“IN TURKISH,” WRITES ELIF SHAFAK, “one says ‘I am at depression’ instead of ‘I am depressed’ … as if depression were less a state of mind than a specific area, a dark corridor with only a weak lightbulb to illuminate the place.” Shafak, whose critically acclaimed novels include The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love, tackles post-partum depression in her memoir Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within. An introspective departure from her fiction, Black Milk takes on the challenges women writers face in reconciling independence with motherhood. 

The title draws on the suggestive concept of the harem, which in the Western imagination usually conjures visions of stereotypically pliant, cloistered beauties, or of women ravished by their captors in romance novels. But the distorted harems of Orientalist fantasy bear little resemblance to the reality, the harem that refers mainly to the women’s quarters of the extended family. Shafak adds a new and unusual twist to the idea, with the “harem within,” in this case, referring to the multiple and dissonant voices in her own head, sending the author contradictory messages about her identity as both a woman and an artist. 

Referring to these discordant voices as the “finger women” or the “Thumbelinas,” these members of Shafak’s internal harem represent her conflicting feelings about issues such as spirituality, sexuality, intellectualism, and, most significantly, maternity. The finger women are Shafak’s fragmented selves forever clashing with one another: Dame Dervish speaks in Sufi parables and urges her to take life in stride while Ambitious Chekhovian insists that motherhood is utterly incompatible with her writing career.

The finger women have come to dwell within Shafak in the absence of a real harem, the community of female family members who would traditionally be present at the most crucial junctures of a woman’s life. Shafak contrasts her experience with her grandmother’s more traditional one, where women placed fewer expectations upon themselves, and where other women offered sympathetic, communal help. Her post partum depression arises, she suggests, out of isolation. Turkish tradition has held that women should never be left alone in the forty days after giving birth; women of the past recognized, Shafak writes, that “throughout her life, a woman goes through several major stages, and the transition from one to the next might not be easy.” Left alone with the incompatible voices of the finger women, seemingly bereft of female community, Shafak struggles to determine how motherhood will affect her identity and alter her life. 

Shafak pairs her internal dialogues with short essays on her own peripatetic existence and on the marriage and family choices (or compromises) that other women writers have made, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, and lesser known figures like Sevgi Soysal, a Turkish writer prominent in the 1970s. Soysal “was the writer of women dangling on the threshold — between sanity and insanity, society and the individual, setting the table and walking away,” and her fictional characters were also pulled between the contradictory dema...