You Be Mother
Page 37
At 24, Meg Mason was newly married to a man ‘essentially indistinguishable from a young Matt Damon’ after landing her dream job, writing for The Times in London. What could possibly go wrong? A holiday in Greece, an accidental shortage of birth control, and eight months later she was sobbing on the side of a road over trading her career for something she knew zip about. On October 8, 2003, she invented motherhood by Having A Baby. On October 9, she discovered a bunch of women had done that already. But still they couldn’t tell her how to do it. Thanks to a helpful neighbour she knew that convincing a newborn to take a bottle by letting it lick a Dorito first to ‘get more thirsty’ didn’t always work, but not what to do when your child won’t sleep for roughly two years in London or in Sydney, or how to remove your hand from a stroller – after you’ve superglued it to the handle. Hair-raising, terrifying and hilariously funny, along the way she discovers that being a mother, however disaster-prone, just might be the only thing that she is truly irreplaceable at.
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2017
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
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Copyright © Meg Mason 2017
The right of Meg Mason to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978 0 7322 9353 6 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 0 7304 9533 8 (ebook)
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Mason, Meg, author.
You be mother / Meg Mason.
Families – Fiction.
Mothers – Fiction.
Interpersonal relations – Fiction.
Cover design by Lisa White, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover illustration by James Hancock