The octopus metaphor at the heart of Emma Knight's novel about motherhood

When Canadian writer Emma Knight was a teen, she decided to move across the pond to attend the University of Edinburgh.

"For me, it was the idea of adventure that attracted me," said Knight on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "And the moodiness of the city of Edinburgh, its beauty, its architectural gloriousness."

Her debut novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus takes her back to Scotland, where, like Knight, the protagonist Pen also finds herself in Edinburgh for school. 

There, Pen is set for an eventful first-year university experience, all while she looks for answers about her parents' messy divorce by writing a letter to her dad's estranged best friend, thriller writer Lord Lennox. When he invites her to spend a weekend at his family estate, she can't help but become enthralled with his entire family — and slowly begins to unravel the family secrets that left her parents so pained.

Knight is an author, journalist and entrepreneur based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Vogue, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The New York Times. She co-hosted and created the podcast Fanfare and co-founded the organic beverage company Greenhouse.

She is the author of cookbooks How to Eat with One Hand and The Greenhouse Cookbook.

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Knight joined Roach to discuss The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus and why it works as a metaphor for the multitudes of motherhood.

Mattea Roach: What is it that makes Pen feel that there's some sort of secret about her parents relationship that she might want to uncover?

Emma Knight: I'd say it's less of a presence and more of an absence. She grows up with this gap in her knowledge — that when she does try to press on that area, she can see the pained look on her parents' faces and she can understand by the quality of their silence that this is not a place that they would like to have her probe. 

I was very interested, while writing this novel, about the Jungian concept of individuation. The idea that you're not born a full human being, you spend your whole life becoming one. And that figuring out who you are specifically as an individual does require some understanding of where you come from. 

In the case of Pen, she really wants to understand what it was about love that resulted in so much pain for her parents. She is an optimistic young person and somebody who loves reading, especially 19th century novels.

She wants to understand that gap and know, in her own journey, whether to be optimistic, what to look for, if love should be a part of that.- Emma Knight

Romance is appealing to her. She doesn't believe in it, her practical experience is that marriage does not lead to forever companionship and a balm for the soul.

She wants to understand that gap and know, in her own journey, whether to be optimistic, what to look for, if love should be a part of that and so on. 

MR: Even though the book is not about the octopus, there's this line later on in your novel where a character uses the octopus as a metaphor for this theme of motherhood throughout the book. What sparked the idea to bring this marine creature into your novel as this metaphor?

EK: It wasn't premeditated. When the character said that, the phrase kind of got stuck in my head.

There's a Loch Ness Monster that we can torture ourselves with and that I was torturing myself with pretty actively at the time of writing this novel, which I'd say is this image of the perfect mother, the one who sacrifices everything, including who she wants to be or thought she was going to be, all independent ambition and drive and selfhood for her children. 

It's not a spoiler to say that in the life cycle of the common octopus. Not just the common octopus, many different species of octopus: you have the female entering senescence after caring for her eggs, and that means that she begins to waste away, she stops feeding herself, she becomes purely alive in order to sustain that next generation's birth, and then she is instantly obsolete.

It's also true of the male. It actually happens sooner for the male.

That image of this female character sacrificing everything for her young was something that I couldn't really get out of my head.- Emma Knight

But that image of this female character sacrificing everything for her young was something that I couldn't really get out of my head as I was writing this. 

MR: You examine motherhood in this novel through a number of different mother-daughter relationships that play out in very different ways — but the novel didn't feel judgmental about the different ways that people choose to be mothers. What were you trying to get at by displaying motherhood in all of these different iterations? 

EK: I think you've really put your finger on it. It's about that suspension of judgment and understanding that all the different ways there are to be human, there are the same number of ways to be a mother and that if you're being an authentic version of yourself, that's better, I think, for your children than if you're suppressing a part of yourself. 

To go back to that Jungian philosophy, there's individuation and then there's also this idea that the unlived lives of parents is a burden that children carry forward. And by unlived lives, Jung talked about thwarted hopes and missed opportunities.

It's important as we move into the future, to pause and recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect mother and that humanity is what matters here.- Emma Knight

I'm very conscious of the past generations, specifically of women that have allowed me to have the freedom that I have because it is by no means a given for  a young woman to be able to go to university at all.

It's only fairly recent that that's allowed. When I think about the sacrifices that my grandmothers made of their own sense of self in order to pour all of that love and dedication into the five children that one of them had and six that the other had it's just such a different equation from the one that I have had the privilege of of growing up with. 

It's important as we move into the future, to pause and recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect mother and that humanity is what matters here. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Talia Kliot, with thanks to Ailey Yamamoto.