Enter Inferno. With the subtitle A memoir of motherhood and madness, Cho’s first book occupies an interesting space in the landscape of ‘momoirs’. Tumarkin identifies some of the genre’s recognisable features as ‘the vomit-on-the-blouse candour, the smell-of-my-baby’s-foot lyricism, reflections on the author’s self transformed by a new life’s momentous arrival, obligatory self-deprecation’. These tropes are recognisable in Cho’s memoir, but they appear as much darker versions of their usual selves. Inferno is certainly full of candour – unsettlingly so, at times – but its focus is not the bodily excretions of her newborn. Rather, from a psychiatric unit, Cho writes, ‘I know I should miss Cato [her baby], but my mind is still blank when I think of him.’ Inferno is also full of lyricism, but not of the baby’s foot kind. Cho has a poet’s eye for detail and imagery; her prose renders her account of postpartum psychosis crystalline, horrifying, and sometimes grimly beautiful.

Catherine Cho (photograph by Curtis Brown/Madeleine Milburn)

As for ‘the author’s self transformed by a new life’s momentous arrival’: Inferno is the story of a new mother’s self near-obliterated. When the onset of Cho’s psychotic breakdown lands her in hospital two months after the birth of her son, she is admitted to a psychiatric unit as an involuntary patient. She is told by one of the workers that ‘you need to have a written autobiography to go from involuntary to voluntary’, the implication being that in order to be considered sane and safe – in order to have, or to be, a ‘self’ – you have to know and understand your own story. ‘I feel like I am reconstructing myself from my memories,’ Cho writes. ‘I am following a thread from the past to the present, and then I will know, I think. I will know how I got here. I will know who I am. And then, maybe I will be able to find a way to leave.’

Inferno is the record of this attempt: Cho’s efforts to reconstruct herself from the memories that slowly begin to return as she recovers. The result is the intricate story of her life up to the point when she was admitted to hospital, cleverly woven through key details and remembered moments, interspersed with accounts of Cho’s time in the psych ward. By the time these two threads meet in narrative time, the reader is in a position to comprehend nuanced connections between moments of Cho’s life – some- times minute ones, such as the look in her mother-in-law’s eye in a particular memory – that collide in her mind and come to alarming fruition while she is in the thrall of her psychosis.

Cho has written a book with the topic of motherhood inarguably at its core. Her illness is postpartum psychosis – triggered by the birth of her son and the two months of early parenthood that follow – and it is her motherhood that she ultimately returns to at the book’s close. In narrative terms, motherhood occupies only Inferno’s periphery. As Cho pieces her memories and her mind back together, we are told of her childhood, growing up with her brother Teddy; she remembers and reconstructs her complicated relationships with her parents, and with the Korean traditions – ‘or superstitions, as I thought of them’ – that she has inherited. Cho remembers, ‘I was twenty-two when I fell in love with the wrong man.’ She describes a prolonged relationship with a violent and abusive partner. Then she meets James, who will become her husband, central to her recovery: ‘My psychosis,’ she writes, ‘for all its destruction and wrath, was a love story. It was a story of sacrifice; an obsessive search for my husband. I thought I was Beatrice, the one who was assigned to lead my husband through Hell, and that my life was a sacrifice for his.’

The birth of a baby and the transition to motherhood can be events that fuse a person’s past, present, and future in previously unforeseen ways – this much has been written about before. But Inferno presents us with a mother as we rarely get to see them: Cho sees demons in her baby’s eyes, forgets who she is, tears her clothes off in the hospital waiting room and screams. She sees her baby and doesn’t recognise him: ‘He looked like a stranger. I searched myself for some emotion, but I couldn’t find any.’

As Cho delves into her past to make sense of her present, and to thereby regain access to her future, Inferno serves as a testament to the ways in which a person’s self is built through their relationships to and with other people. It is by examining and honouring her relationships with others – with her husband, her parents, her parents-in-law, her brother, and even the other patients that she meets on the ward – that Cho is able to come back to her senses, herself, and her family. In the process, she demonstrates that memoir can still ‘blast open’ (Anne Carson, via Tumarkin) the topic of motherhood, and have us considering it anew.