Soldier Sailor

January 1, 2024

Rooney Prize for Irish Literature winner Kilroy explores the trauma, strain, and joy of motherhood, following her 2012 novel The Devil I Know. The Soldier of the title is an exhausted mom, parent to her toddler son Sailor. His terrible twos--and his very existence--are wreaking havoc. Prepub Alert.

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May 1, 2024
In this intense first-person narrative, a mother explores the emotional extremes she has experienced during her son's first years of life. Irish novelist Kilroy, who has previously written autobiographical nonfiction about postpartum cognitive difficulties, joins the coterie of recent writers whose fiction exposes the dark alleys of early motherhood. A pattern of ambivalence, guilt, and overpowering love repeats throughout Kilroy's novel. Narrator Soldier recounts to her 4-year-old son, Sailor, her difficulties in adjusting to being his mother: the depth of her love ("I would kill for you"), her exhaustion, her loss of independence and ambition, her resentment toward her largely clueless husband. A pivotal scene that shows the thin membrane "between coping and not" occurs months after Sailor's birth, the day after Soldier endures a particularly nasty fight with her husband: In a state of fatigue and dejection approaching delirium, she decides to abandon her infant son in a misguided act of protectiveness "so another woman could love you better," only to rush back when she hears his cry. While she never acts that scarily again, she shares other moments of milder derangement any mother will recognize. Soldier's sense of isolation, exacerbated by her husband's seeming obliviousness, continues until she meets a former acquaintance who happens to be a stay-at-home dad. Hanging out with her new friend at the playground makes mothering more fun and turns her into a "better mother" if a "worse wife." While the friendship remains ostensibly platonic, her marriage reaches a crisis point. Kilroy's central idea about the difficulties of early motherhood can feel familiar, but her narrator's wit, brutal honesty, and unsentimental love for her child--and imperfect but ultimately decent husband--set this book apart. A sharp, funny, often painful yet oddly hopeful take on adjusting to motherhood.

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Starred review from May 15, 2024
Soldier begins this story addressed to her young son, Sailor, with an early episode that almost ended everything. Wild with the wretchedness of new motherhood, Soldier nearly abandoned infant Sailor in a field until something in his cries led her back to him, just in time. This everlasting tether between them is the guts and glory of Irish writer Kilroy's (The Devil I Know, 2014) penetrating novel of parenthood and all its contradicting simultaneity. Getting little Sailor to do anything is ""like threading a needle, where the thread has agency and hates needles,"" but she and he are also ""the most beautiful thing I had ever been part of."" A run-in with an old friend, an at-home father to three young children, offers Soldier a glimpse of more functional family life and a lens to process the loss that came with becoming a mother--everything, it seems, that she was before, ""the person I have come to think of as more essentially me than the person I am now."" Kilroy's writing hums with poetry, insight, and humor, and her unconventional motherhood novel, akin to Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch (2021), is deceptively easy reading, full of truths so sharp and beautiful readers will need to take a breath.

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May 27, 2024
Kilroy’s gut-wrenching latest (after The Devil I Know) finds a mother, Soldier, recounting to her son, Sailor, the first few years of his life. The action moves fluidly between past and present, mimicking the out-of-time nature of early motherhood, and the immersive prose veers from lyrical (“The world rotated beneath us and we were the world”) to brutal (when Sailor was whining at six months old, Soldier screamed at him to “Shut the fuck up”). Soldier also expresses resentment toward men, including her husband, for never having to go through childbirth (“Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?”). At times it can be difficult to distinguish between what actually happened and Soldier’s dark fantasies, such as her plan to abandon Sailor as an infant—but the novel builds to a gorgeous closing soliloquy, in which Soldier lays bare the confounding and heartbreaking reality of mothering. This is worth seeking out.