For those readers who don’t know the Turkish writer Elif Shafak, let me preface this review by saying that she is a brave woman and thinker, first and foremost, and a compelling novelist, the most famous in Turkey (she has quite a following in the United States as well). She writes novels in both English and Turkish, something that Orhan Pamuk should attempt, as it is hard enough to write a novel in one language, writing one in a language that is not your mother language is quite a challenge. We are not all multilinguists like Joseph Conrad.

Shafak was heavily pregnant when she faced a prison sentence for the words of one of her characters in her highly acclaimed novel The Bastard of Istanbul. Apparently, the female character made a reference to the killings of Armenians almost a hundred years ago, calling it a genocide, a taboo term in the Turkish culture. Turkey denies that there was such a systematic killing. And in a time of war, it claims that many Turks were massacred too. The issue is still a sore spot for Turks and Armenians. Luckily, the court acquitted Shafak (she was charged with “insulting Turkishness”).

When I saw her new memoir Black Milk on display at my neighborhood bookstore, I purchased it without any forethought, so entranced I was by her work. I had read another novel by Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love, exploring Sufism and the life of the mystic poet Rumi, who lived in central Anatolia in the thirteenth century. Being Turkish, of course, I am drawn to Shafak’s novels and characters. But to enjoy her new memoir, you don’t have to be Turkish, or have an interest in Turkey or Turkish politics. You don’t even have to be a writer or mother. Ultimately though, women who are writer-mothers will feel especially pulled into the memoir’s main theme: the tug of war between the all encompassing writing life and motherhood.

Shafak writes of this struggle with the mind of a literary writer but in a style all her own—an utterly refreshing down-to-earth candor. Her story begins with a life altering conversation over a cup of tea. Shafak is invited to the home of a famous Turkish novelist. The woman, who is now in her eighties, confronts her with the choice of motherhood and the writing life after revealing that she herself had forsaken children for the pursuit of writing. Shafak begins to dwell on the subject, and it is at this conjunction that her harem of finger-women make their debut. The six thumbelinas that live inside of her head: Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, Miss Highbrowed Cynic, Little Miss Practical, Dame Dervish, Blue Belle Bovary and Mama Rice Pudding. Each is a different facet of Shafak, ranging from the ambitious professional to the pure motherly figure.

For instance Little Miss Practical remarks, “Women can be good mothers and good career women. And they can be happy. It’s simple. The key is time management.” Miss Ambitious Chekhovian counters: “[The writing life] It’s a lifestyle. It’s a lifetime passion. An artist needs to be ambitious and passionate. You don’t work nine to five. You breathe your art twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” Inevitably, the novelist is selfish (everything comes second to writing), and the mother selfless. It’s an immense conflict that Shafak shows though the confrontational conversations of her finger-women. For the most part the bickering and power struggle between them is engaging and believable. However, at times when they are driving her crazy, they are driving the reader crazy as well.

The “Sieve Woman:” that is how the traditional wife and mother is introduced by Shafak. Such a woman is consumed with household chores, cooking, ironing and tending to young childen. How could such a woman ever write? She tells the stories of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Sylvia Plath, among many others who did at great cost. And she also raises the question: How many women could have been great writers, but weren’t?

In our day and age, most women have had careers before motherhood. How are they to simply forget their own aspirations, their thinking, working being, and instead, tend to the needs of a small child? Shafak refers to the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing, who was highly critical of the manner in which capable women changed after birth. Happy domesticated for a while, Lessing believed that sooner or later, these women became restless, demanding, and even neurotic. “There is no boredom like that of an intelligent young woman who spends all day with a very small child,” Lessing said.

Giving the book five stars, which I believe it deserves, I must make a disclaimer that there are parts that fall short: the thumbelinas sometimes drone on, the bios on female writers fail to tie in with the writer herself. I would have enjoyed Shafak sharing with the reader how these writers shaped her as a writer and thinker. Also, the narrative sometimes reads like a journal, a hodgepodge of topics mixed together, its continuity lost as we switch from artist bios to the thumbelinas, to her writing life to her personal life. And most importantly, one of the most compelling issues she faces, her postpartum depression, is only discussed at the end of the book (during this time she loses her ambition and cannot write for eight months); the trial is only mentioned in passing.

Still, Shafak has reached a breakthough in addressing a topic that hasn’t been addressed enough: the challenges of balancing the all encompassing writer’s life and the all encompassing mother’s life. How can they both co-exist? Shafak’s writing exudes her own mystical, lyrical style, lush and vivid, spiritual and otherworldly; her inspiration from Sufism is evident. She is witty and entertaining. Her ideas are bold, inspirational, brilliant, and universal. Any woman can take her golden nuggets of wisdom, but writer-mothers can especially take great comfort from her musings and conclusions. ( )