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"As with humans, the young midge grew inside its mother and drew sustenance from her. And like human mothers, the adult midge ate increasingly more to meet her own needs and satisfy those of her hungry young. But the gestation of a baby midge ended grotesquely, for its demands won out in the end. It emerged into the world from a hollow shell, leaving behind the remnants of the mother it had consumed (167)."

In her debut novel, She Let Herself Go , Halifax based writer Thea Smith employs this example as a metaphor for a fear of at least one aspect of motherhood that (some/most/all?) women feel. Namely, can personal identity be sustained within motherhood or will a woman's identity be swallowed by it? The novel's protagonist, Ruth Gardner, feels the pressure of this question in an especially acute way because she is experiencing the first pangs of menopause. Moreover, Ruth is childless. And what seemed like a free choice not to have children during her youthful years now begins to feel like a failure in her teleological function to reproduce as she enters a time when child bearing becomes a brute impossibility, a fact beyond choice. This is brought home to her painfully when her husband, Richard, lets it slip that he regrets that they have not had children. She Let Herself Go explores these themes of menopause and reproduction in a fabric that allows for a rich tapestry of underlying themes about marriage, family, friendship, and growing old. The thread that keeps this tapestry together, however, is personal identity, and so I shall begin there and attempt to weave in the various other threads as I move along.

Contemporary thought has come increasingly to think of identity as something that only occurs within, and indeed is constituted by a web of relationships. Hence, the Enlightenment notion we have inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - that the self is radically free - has come under considerable criticism. The feminist philosopher Susan Sherwin1 , for example, claims that autonomy has to be thought of as relational; that is, that the choices we make are the result of a complex of social factors, which, not incidentally, she claims, have operated to keep women out of positions of power.

Contemporary life, then, has come to be viewed as a struggle of self definition in the midst of all the roles we play, and the functions we are expected to fulfill. This is Ruth's struggle in She Let Herself Go , one which, unfortunately, she initially fails at given her inability, early in the novel, to find her own voice at all. Indeed, Ruth appears particularly vulnerable to the opinion of others, and indeed to having others define her completely. Hence, she constantly has to view herself in the mirror in order to get a sense of how she looks to others; she is overly sensitive to appearing foolish, even to children; and she is bothered by the smallest hint of disapproval from her husband. She needs to learn to 'let herself go,' to find a way in which to articulate her own way in the world even in the face of all the relationships in which she finds herself.

She is enabled to do this, in part, because Richard has accepted a short-term work project from his employer in another city. This leads to at least a temporary separation which Ruth describes as "the last straw and the solution" (p. 332) to their marital difficulties since it provides Ruth the time and the space to discover herself in relation to people other than him, and by extension to her being defined as wife and (failed) mother.

Freed from the constraints imposed on her by her husband, Ruth finds comfort in her friendships with Helen, an older, widowed woman who desperately wanted children but couldn't have any, and with Amy, a new and younger neighbor who has a young son and is pregnant with her second child. Ruth's older sister Joan, a recently widowed woman with two grown-up children, completes this quartet of women. Between them, they delve into all aspects of their lives: their hopes and aspirations, regrets, as well as the many issues about which they are deeply ambivalent. Through these explorations, Ruth comes slowly to answers about who and what she is, and what place her husband and others may play in the rest of her life.

Smith captures well the pressures of being a childless woman. The novel made me reflect upon my own lack of children and upon the ways in which that has served to define me. I recalled, for example, the painful remarks of others when I was going through my divorce that, as they put it, 'at least there were not any children involved'. Somehow, my experience even of that was not taken to be quite complete or genuine (although I believe that their remarks were meant, ironically, to be reassuring). Smith also has a sense for the difficulties and indeed at times the ambiguities of aging in our youth obsessed culture. For example, Ruth is tormented by the fact that men, and even adolescent boys, perceive her as an 'old woman' who no longer elicits any sexual interest from them. In the eyes of men, she has become, she realizes, a non-entity sexually not only in the reproductive sense but in the recreational sense as well. Yet, as she comes to realize, this fact also means that she no longer has to bother with whether men find her attractive, and this entails a new form of freedom. As Ruth puts it: "It seems that some time around puberty we start being cautious and hiding what we're really like. We keep ourselves under wraps so we'll attract men … But those days are over, so shouldn't we stop hiding ourselves … shouldn't we be ourselves again" (pp. 359-360).

While She Let Herself Go displays a whole host of positive features, the novel also exhibits some of the growing pains of a first novel. The dialogue, for example, is sometimes strained, and some of her turns of phrase fall flat (e.g., "A high pressure system was pressing against the window, like the face of a good friend." (p. 123). As readers, moreover, we are sometimes left with insufficient background concerning characters and their past relationships. Richard, for example, simply doesn't seem to act in a way to incur the wrath he often induces in Ruth, and in general Ruth's anger at people appears a little over the top. I also found myself wishing for more humour in the novel as a counterpoint to the complex issues being examined. Ruth in particular seems incapable, outside of one or two minor incidents, of making light either of herself or of her situation.

This being said, however, She Let Herself Go is an impressive debut novel that I recommend heartily. In it, Smith has shown a talent for exploring deep issues about the self and of expressing the feel of people's inner lives. As such, as a writer, she will only improve with age and experience, not unlike her own creation, Ruth. I look forward with anticipation to her future work.

1 Susan Sherwin, "A Relational Approach to Autonomy in Health Care" Reprinted In E. Boetzkes and W. Waluchow, ed's. Readings in Health Care Ethics . Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000. pp. 69-87.