Simon Bird<\/a> (of Inbetweeners fame) directed. That more collaborative process \u201cfelt like a more natural fit for those years when I was not really able to give my whole brain to writing,\u201d she says. The mental juggle is still very much part of her reality: on her way to meet me, Owens got a message to say her daughter was sick at school. Bird went to collect her. <\/p>\n![\"Virginia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-55853534.jpg\")
Virginia Woolf’s classic novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ was one of the influences for Lisa Owens\u2019 \u2018Natural Disaster’, set over one day (Getty)<\/p>\n
As she emerged from the trenches of early parenthood, Owens found it difficult to initiate work on a new novel; doing so requires long stretches of time spent alone, something to which she\u2019d become unaccustomed. She had been writing short stories, and eventually her agent suggested that she just keep going with one to see if it could grow into a longer work. Owens realised the moment in which the mum gets her double buggy stuck in a shop door (a scene which one reader told Owens left them needing to \u201cpop a betablocker\u201d) was too intense to be a standalone story, but could be the heightened point of something bigger. <\/p>\n
I came back from maternity leave myself at the start of the year and found Natural Disaster to be an incredibly evocative, funny and often profound depiction of the wild early days of looking after a very small child by yourself all day. How in a single day \u2013 a single hour \u2013 you might find yourself juggling the sublime with basic survival, and how impossible that is to describe to someone else. Attempting to explain it to her partner \u2013 who has very helpfully slipped away to Barcelona for a work conference \u2013 Owens\u2019 protagonist finds it \u201cas futile as relaying a dream – all the urgency and significance evaporate in the telling, leaving only a puzzling residue\u201d. <\/p>\n
Natural Disaster is only 196 pages, but everything is here. The inability to not channel \u201cchildren\u2019s TV presenter voice\u201d the instant your progeny so much as frowns. The \u201cArguments Not Worth Having\u201d with your partner. The lingering prospect of boomer judgement whenever you have to parent in front of the older generation. The self-inflicted despair of attending regular group activities despite the fact your child is far too young to understand anything that is happening. The surprising number of YouTube instruction videos you have to watch in order to be able to assemble basic equipment. And the incessant internalised guilt and shame at not being a good enough parent. <\/p>\n
For the mum in the novel, even her failure to summon the energy to take her two kids swimming becomes \u201cyet another way she is disloyal to womankind and motherhood\u201d. Feeding her son sugary, processed foods like Coco Pops for breakfast is \u201csomething she can\u2019t confront without inviting a full mental pile-on\u201d. She assumes her husband \u201cdoesn\u2019t lie awake at night drafting tabloid headlines about the potential fallout of his own poor judgement\u201d as she does. <\/p>\n
I remember googling \u2018Greta Gerwig childcare\u2019 when she was making \u2018Barbie\u2019, just like, I know she has two kids and she\u2019s doing \u2018Barbie\u2019\u2026 how does that work?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s amazing, it\u2019s hard; it\u2019s A Lot. As Owens puts it in her novel, \u201cThe point is that no single moment, neither wailing low nor euphoric high, can come close to representing the round-the-clock immersive theatre that is parenthood.\u201d<\/p>\n
A day, suggests Owens, is \u201cthe classic unit of parenthood, particularly when they\u2019re tiny\u201d; it\u2019s how newborn babies\u2019 lives are measured. But it also felt like a good form for a novel about motherhood, \u201cwhich does really fly up and down the scale all day every day of the existential and the totally mundane,\u201d she says. \u201cI hadn\u2019t seen that kind of minute-to-minute experience on the page and that was what I was trying to go after.\u201d The \u201chectically close\u201d experience of watching Uncut Gems, a nerve-flaying film about a New York City jeweller balancing debt collectors with marital affairs, was also an influence. <\/p>\n
Owens does think having her children accounts for the 10-year gap between her novels. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t change that,\u201d she says, although admits that \u201cI think I thought that maybe the two might be more compatible than they turned out to be.\u201d We don\u2019t tend to ask male authors how they manage to write and be dads, and Owens says, \u201cI\u2019ve seen some people refuse to answer that question unless you ask their male counterpart.\u201d She, however, craves that information. \u201cI\u2019m desperate to hear that stuff. I remember googling \u2018Greta Gerwig childcare\u2019 when she was making Barbie, just like, I know she has two kids and she\u2019s doing Barbie\u2026 how does that work?\u201d<\/p>\n
She recently read an interview where novelist Lauren Groff described time as \u201cthe secret currency of art\u201d. \u201cI had just not quite appreciated that before having children,\u201d Owens says. What Natural Disaster so brilliantly captures is how the finite resource that is an hour, a minute, a second in a day becomes just another logistical conundrum to solve when you have small children, particularly in an age where families can be more isolated from their \u201cvillage\u201d and there is pressure on both parents to earn. <\/p>\n
A simple laundry-related question from her protagonist\u2019s husband becomes \u201cdark and loaded\u201d, the woman affronted by the idea that \u201cshe wasn\u2019t perpetually engaged in a game of domestic Tetris\u201d. She marvels at the realisation that \u201cas a mother, her entire infrastructure was\u2026 herself!\u201d, that she always ends up changing the bedsheets during the child-free 20 minutes granted to her by her husband on a Sunday night. But the way that the rituals which mark these days become almost unbearably freighted with emotional significance is here too, as the mum keeps putting off \u201cthe finality of The Last Feed\u201d. <\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/iStock-152404506.jpg\")
The protagonist in Lisa Owens\u2019 novel is derailed by a trip to the shops with her sons when her double buggy becomes wedged in the door (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n
Because oh, the love! The love is here too. \u201cTo be in such great demand,\u201d thinks Owens\u2019 main character, \u201cwill she ever know love like it again? Nothing could have prepared her for this: the unimaginable bliss of true, unconditional love. But also the crushing pressure of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the kind of love that unfurls in the intimate hours and hours of reading the same picture book together, over and over. These books were an influence on Natural Disaster too, the Jill Murphys and the Janet and Allan Ahlbergs, all \u201cso full of episode but also somehow survivable\u201d, where \u201cthey always end up in bed at the end\u201d. Owens recently wrote a beautiful ode to picture books in The New York Times, about how they helped her process her day too. \u201cFormerly lived on our own independent terms, it has suddenly been turned inside out,\u201d she wrote of life as a parent, \u201cdictated first and foremost by the infant whose needs and parameters keep changing.\u201d <\/p>\n
Children love those books because they see themselves in them at a time when they are adapting to their existence in the world. It\u2019s very hard to write about something as subjective and relentlessly various as motherhood, particularly in a way that reflects that reality, but I feel I need to thank Owens on behalf of every new mum I know. When we are adapting to our new existence in the world, her book feels like a comrade on a journey packed with events, exhaustion and ecstasies. Because, as Owens put it in her piece, \u201cgood art has the power to move us, but it also has the parent-like capacity to contain us\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018Natural Disaster\u2019 is out now, published by Virago. Lisa Owens will be speaking at Henley Literary Festival on Sunday 4 October at noon; henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-673914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}