The Mother Is Restless and She Doesn't Know Why

Crackling with intelligence and wit, a critical memoir about how nihilism might just get you through. ‘Here is how I start: I read Nietzsche. I read Nietzsche in bed, with a chest cold. I highlight things in green and draw exclamation marks in the margins.I text friends. You wouldn’t expect I could be having so much fun reading Nietzsche, I tell them.They are worried about their children, about lockdown, about money, about their marriages.I am reading Nietzsche, I repeat. I text them quotes from Nietzsche. They do not reply.’ Gemma Parker’s parents were impulsively itinerant, and her literary heroes were utterly committed to following their muse, dashing into foreign lands and up mountainsides.To write properly about nihilism, she herself surely needs to go to Paris!But she’s stuck - by a job, by children, then by covid. Nietzsche says that to be worth anything at all, art - and life - needs to break all rules and work itself out from scratch.As Parker reads the great philosopher’s wor