A Portrait of the Artist as a Pregnant Woman

There’s been growing awareness, in recent years, of the psychological toll new motherhood can take—and yet prenatal depression remains stubbornly shrouded in taboo. A pregnant woman, it’s commonly agreed, should be a happy woman, at peace with her changing body and glowing with expectant joy.

In her mesmerizing and exquisitely rendered memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist in the Verge of Motherhood, JoAnna Novak upends this ideal, conjuring the dissonance of suffering from depression while nurturing new life. Five months pregnant and beset by self-doubt, she becomes consumed by the work of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin, who pursued her art with intense dedication while coping with mental duress. Finding hope in Martin’s doctrine of joyful solitude, Novak follows in her idol’s footsteps to Taos, New Mexico, determined to find a path forward as an artist and a mother.

I spoke with Novak about the myth of the solitary