This is not so much as a review, as 21 reasons why Jessica Hepburn should step onto the stage and take a bow.

Bow 1: Skilful narration

21 Miles is about Jessica’s endeavour to swim the Channel after 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, which she has written about in her previous book, The Pursuit of Motherhood. She gets a skilful narration point for telling the IVF backstory in a way that makes sense to those who don’t already know it but which isn’t repetitive to those who do.

Bow 2: Swimming

It’s an awesome thing that’s hard to describe. Jessica captures it both physically and metaphorically. “I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool, no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself.”

Bow 3: Nature

It’s not just any old swimming but open water swimming that Jessica’s doing here. So the book is also about our relationship with nature. “Even though I feel small and vulnerable, as I start to swim I also feel something else. The words of a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was a child come unbidden into my mind: ‘And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more’.”

Bow 4: Humour

What can I say? This girl’s hilarious.

Bow 5: Food

As if it wasn’t enough to connect motherhood and swimming, Jessica makes this into a food story too. In so doing she integrates another of those themes that’s BIG for most women. Big love to Jessica for her fully-fledged fest of all things edible.

Bow 6: Skilful narration

She gets another skilful narration point for integrating such diverse themes into a coherent story.

Bow 7: Other women

Jessica invites women, ranging from scientist Baroness Greenfield (childless) to businesswoman Nicola Horlick (mother of six), to have lunch with her and answer the question of whether motherhood makes you happy. This is interesting, as it’s a question we don’t tend to ask. It’s also beautifully expansive as she finds a point of connection in each of the women’s baby stories and thereby binds them (us) together.

Bow 8: Reflections on motherhood

She might have missed the experience of motherhood but she had the meaning (to paraphrase TS Eliot). Through her quest she unveils insights that are fuller and deeper than those of many a literal mother.

Bow 9: Skilful narration

Jessica asks each of the women to give her one word to take with her on her swim and in so doing creates a poem. She deserves a skilful narration point for the very idea. When she has to dig deep in her swim, she recalls those words with each stroke. In so doing takes all the women she has interviewed with her and, by extension, all of womankind too. God bless you, Jessica.

Bow 10: Vulnerability

This vulnerability is all the more powerful because it’s shared before the wound has healed. “Sometimes I think the hardest thing about what I’ve been through – what we’ve been through – is that it makes it difficult to love because you’re so frightened of happiness being taken away.”

Bow 11: Living for the unborn children

A fellow swimmer, Nick, says swimming the Channel is all about the strength of the things deep inside you that are driving you forward. Jessica discovers her motivation. “Mille Gade swam the Channel for her children. I’m swimming it for me and Gertrude Ederle and the children we never had.” I find this both poignant and deeply inspiring.

Bow 12: Uterus-power

Jessica has her doubters, the greatest of which is Chris, who doesn’t think she stands a hope in Hell’s chance because she’s always complaining about the cold. But Jessica unveiled what the competitive sportsman couldn’t see – the gravitational pull of the womb.

Bow 13: Healing of family

It’s not part of the core narrative, but along the way Jessica grows in appreciation for her mum and dad and their own journeys into parenthood. It’s a beautiful reaching back as the stretches forward. After her swim, she goes for a picnic with her mum. “Because although neither of us quite had the family of our dreams, we do have the family of our reality and that will always be something to treasure.”

Bow 14: Control

There are plenty in our culture who make out we can control our destiny through a mix of positive thinking and grim determination. Swimming the Channel and making a baby give the lie to that. This book tells a more truthful story – about the dance between what we can control and what we can’t and is all the more inspiring for it.

Bow 15: Conclusion 1 – sadness

And so Jessica starts to reach her conclusions on her search for the meaning of motherhood. “Every single person in the world seems to have something that makes them terribly sad. And life is about making the best of your sad thing.”

Bow 16: Conclusion 2 – connection

“Connection is vital to human happiness and if you can’t get it ready-made by having your own children you need to create it in different ways.”

Bow 17: Conclusion 3 – something else

Jessica recognises that however much women want to have children, they need to have something else as well. I am sure this is true. There is, at the heart of motherhood, and ambivalence. We want our children, but we also want to get back to our “something else” – our work, our silence, our creativity, whatever it is. If we don’t have a something else, it will be very difficult to let our children go as they grow up. So the something else is at the heart of motherhood as well as the heart of life.

Bow 18: Skilful narration

Jessica manages to keep the story twisting to the end. In almost the last chapter, she reveals she had asked each woman what they would eat for their last supper. When she has finished her swim, she eats that food as a celebration. It’s a surprising detail, all the better for being held back and which celebrates the symbolic power of food as well as nicely concluding the theme.

Bow 19: Climax 3 – relationship

There are three endings to this story, each of which had me in tears. The final (surprising) climax is the last word – love – which Jessica’s partner, Peter, giver her retrospectively as her Channel word. This is a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship. (It’s also NOT a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship and Jessica gets a bonus skilful narration point for the way she manages to tell the story while empathically not telling that story in deference to Peter’s desire for privacy.)

Bow 20: Climax 2 – She did it!

She bloody well did it! Listen to that sound. It’s the sound of all my eggs rushing down my fallopian tubes to stand on the edge of my uterus cheering. Well done Jessica! Bloody, menstrual bloody, well done!

Bow 21: Climax 3 – mother

For me, the most profound part of the book was when Jessica’s mother gave her childless daughter the word “mother” to swim the Channel with. I could have cried her a Channel. I almost did.

I hope you’ve not got backache from all the bowing, Jessica. But you’ve swum the Channel, so you should be OK. What more can I say? Thank you.

Just look in my loft. There are boxes packed with all the pages I have written.

Look on Amazon. You can find my books there.

Look at my home. Apart from gifts, everything I own has been paid for through my hours of labour putting one word in front of the other.

I am a writer – it must be true.

So why is it that all these years (decades), there is nothing that is as hard as writing? All the other things – training adults, filing my accounts, managing a team, teaching children, making websites – none of that is as difficult as the blank page,

the empty brain,

the silent room.

My pride at my four-year-old son, Arch, felt so overwhelming I felt it should not be seen in public. I wondered how other parents handled (or concealed) this obscenely primitive emotion.

As a result I have had three very helpful conversations, two on Facebook and one in the flesh, about the dilemma. (Is it a coincidence that the three people who helped me did not have children themselves?)

Our collective ambivalence about pride

One discussion was about our ambivalence about pride of any kind. Is it good or is it bad?

We expect people to take a pride in their work, for example, but if they are too proud we wag our fingers at them: “Pride comes before a fall.”

I look in the dictionary and see it means both “excessive self-esteem” and “self-respect, personal dignity.”  Those are two very different things – opposites even – and yet the same word covers both. No wonder it’s confusing.

And then there’s that interesting point about whether we can be proud of something that has got nothing to do with us. I would not think so – and yet I am.

I’m proud to be a citizen of a country with a national health service. Did I have anything to do with the creation of the NHS? No, but I’m proud of it nonetheless.

My pride in Arch feels like that kind of thing.

Is gratitude a better word than pride?

One Facebook friend suggested gratitude might be a better word for the kind of emotion I was describing than pride.

I like that idea. It certainly neatly evades all the ambiguities about “pride” and therefore makes the experience of the feeling easier.

Was I proud to see Arch playing the part of a star in his first nativity play earlier this week?

Let’s put it like this. The day he was born I dropped to my knees and said: “No matter how long I live, I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude that this archangel has come to make his home with us.”

I haven’t stood up since.

The pride I take in my own achievements, I can handle – after all my achievements aren’t all that great.

My family and loyal friends will protest: “But Jo, they ARE” and I’ll say: “No, no, anyone could have done it if they’d worked as hard as I did/had as much luck/support/education as me” and I’ll believe what I’m saying. (Or at least I think I will.)

The primal torrent of parental pride

The pride I feel for my four-year-old son, Arch, is something different all together. It is a primal torrent that exudes from my being flooding through any poxy modesty filters I might have created for the sake of social niceity.

It has been there from the moment he was born and threatens to burst forth whenever a friend or stranger inoccently asks: “How’s Arch?” It’s so powerful, it’s obscene. It’s so indecent, I worry that it shouldn’t be let out in public.

What if anyone sees the pride I feel for my son? What if it gets muddled up with the hideously unpalatable envy and competitiveness that seems to be part of the fabric of middle-class parenting?

What do other parents do with their pride?

Fellow parents, can you help me with this one? What do you do with the pride you feel for your children? Do you hide it? Do you wallow in its glow? Do you share it with close friends but conceal it from the parents of your children’s classmates?

Let me know, please. Share your pride – before I burst…