Mother Ship

By Francesca Segal

Published by Chatto

Francesca Segal didn’t meet her identical twin daughters when they were born on October 2, 2015. They were too busy battling to stay alive. Following an unexplained haemorrhage and an emergency caesarean at 30 weeks, her tiny babies were whisked away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), weighing little more than a kilo each.

The next day, Segal peers into their incubators. “I see red starfish hands, and fleshless arms, bone-shaped. I can trace their circulation, the fine leaf-veining of tributaries clearly visible beneath their backs’ translucent skin. I feel my intrusion upon them: they were not ready,” she writes. Nor were Segal and her husband Gabe. The author was in the middle of finishing her second novel, The Awkward Age, having found success and a Costa First Novel award with her debut, The Innocents, in 2012.

One day she was a pregnant “one-woman girl-gang”, hanging out in her local London library and napping in the afternoon. Forty-eight hours later she was a new mother trapped inside the alien, dimly lit world of an NICU, barely able to touch or feed her newborns. “It is an obsessive-compulsive’s paradise here,” she explains. “One cannot be too fastidious: wiping away a single tear from your cheek is enough to transmit an infection.”

Mother Ship is written in the style of a diary — not unlike Adam Kay’s darkly comic This Is Going to Hurt, but from a patient’s perspective and with more tears — and charts the first 56 days of her children’s lives. By the end of day one, Segal discovers the place that will keep her sane during the coming months: the milking shed.

This is the NICU’s real seat of power, where fellow mothers congregate to produce milk for babies too weak even to suck, which is then fed through a tube into their stomachs. Amid the breast pumps shared medical wisdom prevails, modesty is abandoned, gummy snakes are eaten and staff scrutinised. It is where Segal meets Sophie, soon to become one of the most treasured women in her life. “She will lift me up like an angel. She will make me laugh with shocking black humour and shameless smut, like a messmate.” It is also where the beautiful and fierce Kemisha, who gave birth to a 680g daughter, teaches the people-pleasing Segal the art of saying no.

In this small 273-page memoir, we can learn much from the intense friendships forged between these women who aspire to hold their babies and watch Bake Off, but who fear their children will never come home. On day 32, the three of them escape their hyper-sterile ward to eat at a Japanese restaurant across the road. “So much passes between us, above and beneath all that is said. On the way back I feel like heel-clicking and swinging round lampposts like Gene Kelly,” writes Segal.

The daughter of Erich Segal, the Harvard professor who wrote the 1970s bestseller Love Story, Segal constantly invites the reader inside her clever, curious mind. It is full of thoughts about grief (parents are expected by staff to remain “jolly and indefatigable”), separation (returning home every night feels like a daily “amputation”) and what it truly means to be a mother. Milestones taken for granted elsewhere become miraculous achievements.

There is the “transgressive” moment when Segal finally breast-feeds one of the twins, concluding: “I have felt myself taken from them so completely that I could not trust that my children recognised their mother, until now.” The other heroes of this story, apart from Segal’s husband, who is literally a saint, are the overworked doctors and poorly paid nurses of the NICU. “I would give each and every person here a kidney if they asked,” she writes on day 50, “except for Kitty the agency nurse, naked in her interest in the teeny-tiny dolly babies.”

Mother Ship is a huge achievement for Segal, who has produced a memoir that promises to linger with you like a literary earworm. Having witnessed the raw struggle of their early life, and curious to see what they look like now, I google a recent newspaper picture of the twins, who will be four in October. Their big eyes and chubby cheeks stare back at me, an extraordinary testament to the power of human survival.