Interview of Naima Brown by Freya Bennett
Naima Brown’s Mother Tongue is a gripping and darkly funny exploration of identity, reinvention, and the impossible choices women face when trying to carve out a life for themselves. With sharp insight, Brown captures the monotony of motherhood when it doesn’t come naturally and the unsettling reality of putting oneself first at any cost. Her writing is nothing short of perfect—full of spark, wit, and an undeniable warmth that makes it clear she’s not just a sharp observer of human nature but a deeply funny and caring person. And yet, despite its personality, her prose never overpowers the story; instead, it propels it forward with precision, letting the characters and their tangled choices take center stage.
Fast-paced and packed with imperfect, unlikeable-yet-compelling characters, Mother Tongue keeps you on edge until its surprising and deeply satisfying conclusion (to me at least, let’s see what others think of the ending!). It’s a novel that challenges our expectations of motherhood and forces us to ask difficult questions about identity, sacrifice, and the cost of reinvention. The concept is utterly fascinating, and if I could choose to have written it myself, I would. In this interview, Brown discusses the novel’s origins, the complexities of Brynn’s transformation, and the delicate balance between selfhood and sacrifice.
Mother Tongue explores themes of identity and reinvention—what inspired the idea of a woman waking up from a coma with a new language and using it as a means of escape?
The first seed of Mother Tongue was planted when I stumbled across a news story about a young Australian man who woke up speaking fluent Mandarin and subsequently moved to China to work in media as a TV host – colloquially referred to as foreign accent syndrome. That story really unlocked something in me. In my own life, I’ve experienced the ways that learning a new language can change a person, and can open new doors and new possibilities and even new frameworks for understanding the world.
As I started to think about it more – I started to play around with and tweak certain variables…like, what if the person who woke up speaking a new language was a woman who was unsettled in her life and in herself….what if she were married…what if she had a child…what if, for her, this development was a life raft…and Brynn began to take shape.
Brynn’s transformation is both exhilarating and unsettling. How did you approach writing a protagonist who makes such radical choices while keeping her relatable?
Can I just say that I really appreciate that you framed this as a question of relatability and not likeability? Because I think that’s where the real meatiness of Brynn as a character is – many women I know find her hard to like, but not hard to relate to – and that, to me, is fascinating.
I am very drawn to characters who are in a process of transformation, or who are deliberately throwing a grenade into their lives in the hopes that it might reveal a truer, more authentic self (however misguided that might be). There’s this idea of the ‘messy middle’ that is a part of any big metamorphosis – and I suppose that’s where I like to meet my characters. And messy isn’t always very likeable – but I think it is deeply relatable.
For Brynn, I hoped to give the reader access to Brynn’s bargaining – the maths that she’s always doing, weighing up the costs and the risks and the assurances and promises she makes to herself to justify her decisions. She is aware that her choices aren’t untethered to consequence – but she is always hoping she might balance the scales somehow.
The novel has been described as darkly funny—how did you balance humour with the heavier themes of identity, motherhood, and self-destruction?
This might sound awful but, for me, there is always something funny about people taking themselves so seriously. And all of the primary characters in Mother Tongue are – for various reasons, very interested in themselves. They all have what we colloquially call ‘main character energy’ and when two or more people with ‘main character energy’ collide, when their egos brush up against each other and they have to contend with each other’s perceptions of one another it can create a kind of disorientation which can be very, very funny. Darkly so, as you say.
Eric’s “dark and dangerous” transformation runs parallel to Brynn’s—can you talk about his role in the novel and how his changes reflect or contrast with Brynn’s?
Ah, Eric. The hard truth is that I have had a front row seat to observing the ways that men – especially white, American ones – can be radicalized by the political right. Unfortunately, much of Eric’s character was modelled after my own dad. Where they diverge – importantly – is in Eric’s descent into white supremacy, that was not my dad’s particular brand of political extremism. But I have seen – close up – the impact of political and religious extremism on the male psyche – and how it bleeds into their relationships with women, in particular.
For Eric, Brynn is not only a disappointment as his wife and the mother of his child – but he perceives her as a dangerous aberration and threat to his entire world view. And because Eric is so unwilling to treat his own wounds – it leaves him wide open to ever more self-inflicted psychological torment, which is most on display with his infatuation with Mary, a piece of wood he picks up at a garage sale.
In some ways what we see between Brynn and Eric is a kind of madness duel – but unfortunately, as we see with their daughter, Jenny, their fight creates quite a lot of collateral damage.
Motherhood is often portrayed as an all-consuming identity In Mother Tongue, Brynn challenges that idea in extreme ways. What conversations do you hope this sparks about the expectations placed on mothers?
The fact of Brynn’s motherhood is an enormous variable in her character’s trajectory – right through to the last page. But we also see her grapple with her role as a wife, as a daughter and friend. Women’s identities – far more than men’s, in my view – are bound up with their responsibilities to the people to whom they are meant to be providing some form of caregiving. This is not necessarily inherently problematic if it weren’t for the fact that the expectation is a kind of relentless identity-eroding selflessness.
I’ll share an interesting story: When the cover for Mother Tongue was revealed, Pan Macmillan carried out a book giveaway on Instagram. Entrants were asked to answer one question: If you woke up speaking a foreign language, what would you do? The lion’s share of respondents were women, and every single one of these women answered that they would immediately go to the country where they could now communicate fluently, that they would run full pelt into the opportunity. It stands to reason that many of these respondents are mothers – yet because the question didn’t mention motherhood – their answers were free from this consideration. I am certain that had the question been: “If you woke up speaking a foreign language, but you had a young child, what would you do?” – the answers would have been very different.
Your background spans anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and journalism. How have these influences shaped the themes and characters in Mother Tongue?
For me – these strands of my life and studies propelled me into the life of an expat. I followed my passions and interests and obsessions – and the languages I was studying – out into the world, very far afield from my origins and my kin. I have lived – and am still living – with the paradox of the gifts and the heartbreak that comes with finding yourself having more than one ‘home’ – my home is very much here in Australia with my husband and our dog, our life here in the Northern Rivers. But it is also very much back in Northern California, with my mom and my sister and my niece and all my loved ones who I don’t see nearly as much as my heart yearns to. There are costs to, as one of the characters in Mother Tongue explains it, heeding the call of your second soul.
The characters of Tariq, his mother Noor and sister Assia are very important to me, and very much a reflection of my time spent studying Arabic and living in the Middle East. I very much wanted their characters to break the Islamophobic and anti-Arab stereotypes that still infuse, influence and misinform much of the Western gaze. And, of course, Tariq gave me the opportunity to wax lyrical about the beauty, depth and versatility of the Arabic language – which I very much miss speaking regularly, and which has now become very rusty, unfortunately, If you don’t use it, you really do lose it.
If Mother Tongue were to be adapted for film or television, who would you love to see play Brynn, Lisa and Jenny? What elements of the novel would be most important to capture on screen? (Really hoping this is adapted!!)
Oh I love this question and I won’t play coy and pretend I haven’t thought about it – because the fact that whoever plays Brynn would have to be fluent in both English and French – or at least act like they are – is a very fun prospect. There’s a young actress, Emma Mackey, from Sex Education, who apparently speaks fluent French – and if she’d be open to donning auburn locks, I think she’d make a spectacular Brynn. Florence Pugh also comes to mind.
As for Lisa…she’s a harder one to cast. I could definitely see young Lisa being portrayed by someone like Maude Apatow. And Jenny? That one’s easy – I always imagine Sophie Nelisse, she plays young Shauna in Yellowjackets and has all the teenage grit and fury that Jenny has.
You mentioned Mother Tongue was ten years in the making. Can you talk us through a bit of this process and what your life looked like as you were chipping away at this masterpiece?
Ah! Masterpiece – you’re very kind.
There are a few reasons why Mother Tongue had such a long incubation. Chief amongst them is that I have always had to work full time whilst writing my novels – and this just naturally slows down the process. The other reason is kind of odd – and even a little magical in my woo-woo California mind – and that is that the idea for Mother Tongue and for my first novel, The Shot, arrived almost simultaneously. I opened two different word documents within days of each other and began furiously writing both of them at the same time. This is not a sustainable way to write, and not a recipe for finishing something! So I made a deliberate decision to set Mother Tongue down whilst I finished and published The Shot. And again, there was a bit of magic afoot here, and the writing gods seemed to smile on me in the sense that one of my core intentions with Mother Tongue was to examine the extremely fraught political times we are living through – particularly in America.
For example, I always knew that Eric – Brynn’s husband – would be a right-wing conservative through which I could explore ideas of radicalisation and political extremism. I also knew that the women in Mother Tongue would be existing within the unprecedented American moment that we’re living through now and grappling with their own ideas of contemporary womanhood in this very specific inflection point. And the fact that I was able to tweak and modify this manuscript right up until the inauguration of the orange guy for his second term, and to reflect on the previous eight years of political turmoil, was a massive gift.
Mother Tongue by Naima Brown (Macmillan Australia, RRP $34.99)
