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The bestselling anti-mother

France has discovered an unlikely bestseller. Corinne Maier, a psychiatrist and mother of two children aged 13 and 10, has written a book about why she regrets having children and warning other women away from motherhood. The Globe and Mail’s columnist Doug Saunders examines the book’s success:

Everywhere you look in France these days, you seem to see its cover: The words NO KID in English, followed by “40 Reasons for Not Having Children” in French. It is a huge bestseller. Her 40 reasons are often funny and personal (“Don’t become a travelling feeding bottle,” “don’t adopt the idiot-language of children”) sometimes bitter (“you will inevitably be disappointed with your child”) and often designed to puncture the idealized notion of motherhood that poisons Western societies.

It is a combination of tart sisterly advice (“What hope is there of having a fulfilling sex life when a woman is forced to turn into a fat, deformed animal decked out in sack-like dresses?”) with shock-tactic social analysis (“More murders and child abuse happen within families than outside them. Every family is a nest of vipers – all the reason not to add to your own”).

Such notions, in France today, are almost unthinkable. It is a country overtaken with what Ms. Maier calls “baby mania.”

There’s a loud and expensive national crusade to have as many children as possible and valorize motherhood. It is a nation where the winner of the President’s motherhood medal (what other country has those?) makes the cover of Paris-Match, a place where people follow the fertility rate the way Americans follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average and where a national celebration with distinctly racist overtones erupted last year when that fertility rate reached the stable-population point of 2.1 children per mother, making France the continental European leader in fecundity. Upon the loins of the Frenchwoman, the weight of a nation.

Maier says she has given copies of her book to both her children, but they have paid no attention to it because “[a]ll they want to read is Harry Potter.”

This Quillblogger suggests that if your mother wrote a bestseller about the evils of children and her regrets about having any, you’d want to escape to Hogwarts, too.

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