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Table of Contents
About The Book
Crackling with intelligence and wit, a critical memoir about how nihilism might just get you through.
‘Here is how I start: I read Nietzsche. I read Nietzsche in bed, with a chest cold. I highlight things in green and draw exclamation marks in the margins. I text friends. You wouldn’t expect I could be having so much fun reading Nietzsche, I tell them. They are worried about their children, about lockdown, about money, about their marriages. I am reading Nietzsche, I repeat. I text them quotes from Nietzsche. They do not reply.’
Gemma Parker’s parents were impulsively itinerant, and her literary heroes were utterly committed to following their muse, dashing into foreign lands and up mountainsides. To write properly about nihilism, she herself surely needs to go to Paris! But she’s stuck – by a job, by children, then by covid.
Nietzsche says that to be worth anything at all, art – and life – needs to break all rules and work itself out from scratch. As Parker reads the great philosopher’s work more deeply – and that of other celebrated nihilists Camus and Beckett – she discovers the life-affirming magic of believing nothing matters. And to find a way of being free, even at home.
Both witty and wise, funny and profound, The Mother is Restless opens up fresh ways of thinking about life, for fans of Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Olivia Laing.
About The Author
© Pierre Andre Goosen
Gemma Parker is a poet and essayist, teaching creative non-fiction at Adelaide University. She has lived, worked and studied in Osaka, Paris, London and Hanoi. Find Gemma at gemma-parker.com.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner Australia (January 28, 2026)
- Length: 272 pages
- ISBN13: 9781761636721
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Raves and Reviews
‘A virtuoso accomplishment. Parker segues effortlessly between the abstract and the personal, the wise and the frivolous. I rejoiced in such braininess, originality, and wit.’
– Anna Goldsworthy, author of Piano Lessons
‘Parker has an uncanny gift for writing that embodies the radical fragmentation of our chaotic present. Through flights of reading and social observation, she suggests how the self can cohere despite outside forces demanding our constant attention. By turns hilarious, melancholic, and searching, Parker’s debut marks the arrival of a writer of serious talent, intelligence, and compassion.’
– Patrick Flanery, author of The Ginger Child
‘The Mother Is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why is a delight of a book – poetic in its sensibility yet with a keen eye for the absurd, and acutely intelligent while also being unafraid of silliness. It is, at its heart, a book about longing and about freedom – and how to reconcile these with the small joys of the everyday, as well as the duties and compromises inherent in love and family life. I never expected to tear through a book about reading Nietzsche – but tear through it I did.’
– Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance
'remarkable and thoroughly engaging'
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'[a] remarkable debut book from Adelaide writer and academic Gemma Parker.'
– Heather Taylor Johnson, inReview
“[a] shimmering [book]”
– Liz Evans,
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