Motherhood can be exhausting, challenging, and, at times, thankless. But in Los Angeles-based writer Jacquie Walters’ debut novel “Dearest,” it’s also terrifying.
Four and a half years ago, Walters was pregnant with her first child when the coronavirus pandemic hit and lockdown orders flashed across television screens and newspaper headlines. There would be no night nurse, no helpful inlaws and no supportive aunties to stop by and give the new parents a reprieve. Just a deadly virus rapidly spreading outside, and Walters and her newborn inside. No amount of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” could have prepared them for this.
SEE ALSO: 15 books coming out in October to add to your reading list
While Walters didn’t experience postpartum psychosis like the protagonist in “Dearest,” she did struggle with postpartum variations of depression and anxiety. “I went into it pretty educated,” Walters tells me over a Zoom call from her home in Los Angeles. “The doctors would say something like, ‘Since you’ve had anxiety in the past, just keep an eye out.’ It’s so weird the way we discuss this stuff. Like, ‘If you’re feeling sad, let us know.’”
“It was really hard for me, and I went into it knowing that that might happen, and it was still really hard, and I just thought, ‘What about all the women that go into this not at all prepared?’”
This experience got Walters thinking about how dire postpartum symptoms can become for some women. She became obsessed with stories of new mothers who had done the unthinkable when in the depths of postpartum psychosis and thought, “This is a horror story, you just can’t get more horrific than this.” She put the idea on the back burner and let it simmer for three years, and then in May 2023, the Writers Guild of America went on strike: Walters, a TV writer, now had some extra time on her hands.
In the first three months away from her typical screenwriting grind, she penned “Dearest,” a haunting postpartum fever dream that reads like a psychological thriller with paranormal twists and turns. With Walters’ screenwriting chops, the story comes to life on the page like a stylish and female-centered A24 horror film à la “Pearl” or “Hereditary” or the 2022 horror thriller “Barbarian,” in which a deranged old woman referred to as “Mother” forces her victims to act like they are her babies.
SEE ALSO: There’s something foul in an LA fashion house in Lilliam Rivera’s ‘Tiny Threads’
“Dearest,” an October Book of the Month pick, opens with the line “Flora’s nipples are infected.” Flora’s daughter Iris is three weeks old and her military husband Connor is deployed and won’t return home for a couple of weeks. A storm is headed her way and she’s stuck inside the house with “crusting skin and yellow discharge” oozing from her breasts. (Body horror is so hot right now.) She’s exhausted and feels like she’s failing as a mother only a few weeks into the gig. She can’t stop envisioning various ways Iris might meet her untimely demise and there’s a crackled male voice coming from the baby monitor that won’t stop cooing at her infant . . . or is there?
“Sleep deprivation is really a massive trigger,” Walters says. “There is a reason it’s a torture tactic; it actually makes people go insane.”
Flora loses her grip on reality. The phantom baby crying that jolts her out of bed, and the singing pig toy whose batteries she’s sure she removed begin to feel like the least of her problems, and although she hasn’t spoken with her mother in years, becoming a mom herself has filled her with longing. “If motherhood comes with an automatic update to our human hardware, then mine is corrupted . . . I could really use your help,” Flora writes to her mom in an email. When Jodi arrives at Flora’s front door, the narrative takes a turn – has she come to save the day or is she a sinister saboteur?
Walters brings generational trauma to the forefront, and the story becomes as much Jodi’s as it is Flora’s as the two untangle their own extremely complicated relationship while caring for Iris. Flora “realizes that the same complex, paradoxical feelings she has for Iris apply to her mother as well. A deep, primal, evolutionarily wired love that coexists with resentment and a desperate need to separate, to individuate.”
SEE ALSO: True crime TV star Joe Kenda based ‘First Do No Harm’ on his own experiences
Walters notes that “your relationship with your own mother changes the second you become a mother,” and wanted to play with the notion that even the most well-intentioned grandparents can push boundaries, so what might happen if they weren’t so well-intentioned?
In “Dearest,” readers get a taste of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis in varying degrees both through Flora and through learning Jodi’s backstory. Walters says she wanted her readers to be put into the minds of women who are so hastily vilified, “to have a tiny, tiny piece of what it would feel like to not know what’s real and what’s not, and to want nothing more than to protect your child, but to also have some feeling of, I don’t even know if that’s what I’m doing, but that’s what I want to be doing.”
SEE ALSO: Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
“I think it’s pretty scary, what we go through, and most of the time we don’t talk about it,” she continues. “Even if we are talking about it, there’s part of the thread that runs through this too, this fear of someone taking your baby away. How can you admit to these things as they’re happening without that fear? It’s like, well, I’m not crazy. I don’t want them to take my child away, but I also need help.”
“Dearest” is Walters’ way of getting readers to pick up a story they might not initially consider. The horror genre, she notes, allows writers to tell stories that people otherwise shy away from. “How easy is it to get someone to pick up a book about postpartum depression? I don’t think a lot of people are going to be drawn to that, but if you can say, ‘Hey, this is a crazy, weird, supernatural ghost story with twists and then it gets them talking about something like postpartum psychosis, well then that’s the goal.’”
Related Articles
An ‘Impossible’ book that U.S. readers can now read
15 books coming out in October to add to your reading list
Things to do in the San Fernando Valley, LA area, Oct. 3-10
No, Kenny G didn’t create Starbucks Frappuccino. But he serenaded Kim Kardashian
This week’s bestsellers at Southern California’s independent bookstores