Jackson, Marni

Journalist and creative nonfiction writer Marni Jackson broke new ground with her 1992 book, The Mother Zone: Love, Sex and Laundry in the Modern Family. Her witty, honest memoir of motherhood, published when her only child, son Casey, was 8 years old, quickly became a national bestseller. Hailed by the Ottawa Citizen as a long-overdue manifesto for mothers that marked the beginning of an undeclared revolution, The Mother Zone is a landmark Canadian work in the field of motherhood studies.

Born and raised in Burlington, Ontario, in 1947, Jackson currently lives in nearby Toronto. She has had a varied career as weekly columnist for the Books section of the Globe and Mail, senior editor of The Walrus, and contributing editor of Saturday Night and Toronto Life. Her feature writing has appeared in the National Post, the Toronto Star, Chatelaine, Maclean's, Rolling Stone, This Magazine, and the Utne Reader. In addition to The Mother Zone, she is the author of Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign. The former co-host of Imprint, TV Ontario's book show, Jackson also has worked in the film and theater communities. She has lectured widely and has taught magazine and creative writing at Toronto's Ryerson University. In 2007, Jackson was appointed the Rogers Communications Chair in Literary Journalism at Alberta's Banff Centre. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for her journalism.

Jackson's memoir was written to counter her maternal amnesia, to fill the “hole in the culture where mothers went,” and to chart the terra incognita of motherhood. She coined the term mother zone to describe the protracted period in a woman's life when she is completely absorbed by the demands associated with nurturing and raising young children. Jackson writes with keen self-awareness—about conception, birth, and the experience of raising her son—and offers an unflinching, often comic account of her life on the front lines of motherhood. In The Mother Zone, she writes openly of motherhood's enormous challenges and joys.

An all-consuming desire to have a child drives the start of Jackson's narrative. At age 37, she fervently embraces her intuitive need to bear and raise a child, but recognizes that her drive to conceive is not felt equally by her spouse, Brian Johnson, and cause for conflict. The perspective that shapes her work is at once intimate but respectful of her husband and son, who are also key characters in her memoir. Veracity is a mark of Jackson's literary [Page 598]achievement: while maintaining the integrity of a journalist, she recounts her personal stories.

The “cracking-open of birth and the streaming out of milk and emotion,” the next stage in motherhood, is described in detail. During labor, Jackson learns to relinquish conscious control of her body, which is “dramatically reorganized” by the birthing experience. The delivery of her son signals a new heightened consciousness for Jackson; in fact, a permanent state of alertness. As she candidly recounts the challenge of breastfeeding, she recognizes that “giving birth is not a discrete event.” Jackson notes that birth may sever the umbilical cord, but infant and mother remain bound both physically and emotionally.

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