Holding the Baby set out to understand why we still treat early parenthood as an individual slog rather than a shared cultural responsibility. Tracing her own journey to the nadir of sleeplessness via social retreat and murderous rage, Frizzell draws on the latest research to explore amid practical guides on raising children, literary explorations about the maternal experience, deep data dives and so call “mom-oirs”. Vogue columnist, Frizzell  describes the earliest stage of motherhood, when your time, identity, body and sense of self is absorbed by the needs of your baby, as “the partial eclipse”. She writes honestly and clearly about her own experience of raising a child in all its “technicolour, hilarious, revolting and frustrating glory”.

Each chapter contains topics that society expects new parents to overlook or deal with in silence – from infant sleep to post-baby body image and intimate relationships. “ I feel Phantom caught between the two bodies. Neither mother, nor lover; just a ghostly white burrata, desperate to be desired, trying to remember who she once was,” Frizzell writes.

It’s time to share the motherhood. A memoir culminating in a manifesto, Holding the Baby explores what effect does parenting have on you’re a career? How can we make childcare more affordable and fit for purpose? If parenting is so hard, why does anyone ever do it more than once? Holding the Baby also sheds light on the ways in which we fail new parents, and offers a rallying crying that we fight for a better alternative.

Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline to Motherhood by Nell Frizzell Bantam Press £16.99, 352 pages.