I first read ‘Big Milk’ when I was deep in the early years of first-time motherhood – a weird time that nothing had quite prepared me for. I loved (and still love) how this story captures some of that weirdness and how it’s effortlessly breezy and, at the same time, as tightly-woven and meaty as a fairy tale.
As the story opens, we meet a mother, her breastfed two-year-old daughter, and the mother’s breasts, which the daughter has named ‘Big Milk’ and ‘Tiny Milk’ and with whom the daughter has charming conversations. However, the story’s protagonist is none of these characters, but the mother’s lover, who is quietly nursing her resentment at being excluded from this cosy, milky world. This jealousy sparks the protagonist to set off on a slightly manic quest to address her other unresolved issues about mothering. The reader is swept along on this compulsive journey towards an ending which seems a perfect example of Flannery O’Connor’s maxim that an ideal story should be at once surprising and inevitable, or as she put it, “both totally right and totally unexpected”.
First published in Why Don’t You Stop Talking?, Picador, 2002
A Personal Anthology 