Soldier Sailor

Kilroy narrates almost entirely in the addled, sleep-deprived second person of a new mother speaking to her infant son, and the novel's formal choice is what makes it land: there's no distance from the disorientation, the resentment, the fear of disappearing into the role. The plot is minimal, an ex-boyfriend's brief reappearance is close to the only external event, because the real drama is interior, tracking how completely a baby's needs can overwrite a woman's sense of who she is. Critics placed Kilroy in a specific lineage of writers who've taken motherhood seriously as literary material rather than sentimental backdrop, and singled out how unsentimentally the book handles the exhaustion and rage alongside the tenderness, refusing to resolve into either misery memoir or reassurance.