robyn reads books

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Originally shared in April while the book was still sitting heavily with me. Reading it again now, I don’t think I’d change much. What follows is the moment as I experienced it. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes preserving the encounter matters more than improving it.

The relentless protection of them. The vastness of the love I have for them. The way it becomes your life’s mission to make sure they are okay, always.

I’ve never been someone who felt like I lost myself in motherhood. If anything, I’m still growing into it as they get older. It’s a gift. I love it.

But we are also walking with grief.
All. The. Time.
It’s there from the beginning.

Watching them grow. Everything they attach to and then leave behind. The slow shift as they become more themselves… and less yours. Even something as small as a routine, done over and over, until one day it just ends. You don’t know which time was the last. Or, it’s simply the final school bus ride.

And let’s just agree that the “what if” loops on long, quiet drives bring us to our knees.

I know their moods, their fears, what makes them feel safe, their insecurities… it all sits deep, but also buzzes right at the surface. I don’t ever want to not feel like this.

So reading Agnes felt real. Not distant or heightened. Recognizable.

When the loss of Hamnet comes it’s not a shock. It’s what it does to everything around it. Judith trying to exist inside the absence of her brother. A family still moving but totally altered in ways that don’t match.

How the distance opens up between a mother and a father, between ways of carrying the weight.

Then to the play. A shift. From something lived, intimate, maternal, to something made for the stage. Having to face it this way.

By the time I reached the ending, I could barely breathe through it. It tightened so much. Sitting there while she raced to the stage, her trying to understand what she’s seeing, the betrayal she feels, the utter confusion of it. Not yet understanding how grief moves through the people around us.

And it just lands.

And I was just… gone.

And it didn’t stop there. It stayed. For days.

Because I wasn’t reacting to the book anymore. It simply touched something I already carry.

And honestly, the fact that Maggie O’Farrell reached me like this is all I really need to say about what she’s capable of.

A work of real depth. A devastating read.

Field note: This book reminds me that grief isn’t always about death. It’s also about the ordinary disappearances we live through without recognizing them. So yes, sometimes I feel this reading experience is about motherhood. But I also wonder now if it is about the extraordinary intimacy of knowing another person’s inner weather so deeply that their becoming changes our own?