GEMMA PARKER The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why. Reviewed by Sally Nimon

For Gemma Parker, Nietzsche and nihilism were surprisingly liberating during lockdown, as she recounts in her memoir.

I’ve long been interested in nihilism because I find the concept of a meaningless existence intoxicating, liberating.

The Mother is Restless opens with author Gemma Parker in lockdown in Australia, pondering existentialism. During that strange, suspended moment of Covid, thoughts of nihilism – the idea that life might lack any inherent meaning – were hardly rare. Many of us found ourselves rethinking our choices, values and the series of decisions that had led us to wherever we were, examining our relationships with those we were forced to stay with and those we were missing. But Parker finds in it something uplifting. And so she writes a memoir that departs from the traditional structure of tracing events in a neat order towards some kind of revelation, to present a life lived in fragments and out of sequence, mirroring the disjointed, uneasy rhythm of a world abruptly shaken from its comfortable, maybe even complacent, routine.

Parker summarises nihilism as asking ‘Why continue living?’ For many this might sound like an endpoint, almost a justification for choosing not to live at all. But to her, and to Nietzsche – her philosopher of choice – it is an open invitation to fill in the blanks of that question, to create your own meaning and value. As she describes it:

Although one can pounce on nihilism as an excuse for anarchy, or yield to the utter despair of it, Nietzsche extolls ‘the death of god’, and the subsequent vacuum of values, as a profound opportunity for ‘revaluation’.

Meaning, then, isn’t handed down by a god or created by an atheistic universe; rather, it’s our own to make. That’s a powerful role, and one we’d do well to handle with care. At one point, Parker is pondering the concept of Steppenwolf as outlined in the writings of Hermann Hesse, ‘a creature that is not quite man, that is wild, but forced to live by the rules of polite society’. Sitting in the car while her husband drives, he suddenly asks what steppenwolf means. Startled, she wonders if he’s been snooping in her notebooks or somehow read her mind, until he tells her it’s the name of the band whose song is blasting through the speakers. A little cosmic joke at her expense.

The structure is deliberately disjointed – organised by theme and stream of consciousness rather than chronology – which some readers may find unsettling. But Parker’s approach feels truer to the reality of how memory actually works than any tidy linear narrative. We don’t record our lives in order; rather, our recollections scatter like jigsaw pieces, resurfacing out of sequence, shaped by mood or the obsession of the moment. We remember through patterns, not timelines, and science tells us that memories aren’t fixed anyway, shifting slightly each time we revisit them. I was reminded of this at a comedy show where the performer built a whole routine around a childhood story with his two brothers, only later to reveal they all remembered it differently, including how many of them were actually there. The point, of course, is that how we construct the story becomes part of the story itself.

Perhaps, most importantly, Parker’s structure and storytelling push back against the easily digestible, soundbite-driven world we live in today. In an age defined by complex problems – environmental, geopolitical, economic and, yes, even existential – this work deliberately goes the other way. Parker doesn’t offer an easy ride. Instead, she makes us work for the meaning, prompting each reader to find the part that most resonates with them. As a result, everyone’s experience of this book is likely to be unique, much like our own journeys through life.

In the end, as Parker reminds us, memory is less archive than invention. Which might just be the lesson of nihilism after all – if life isn’t inherently meaningful, feel free to fill in the blanks on your own.

Gemma Parker The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why Scribner 2026 PB 272pp $34.99

Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre.

You can buy The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. We receive a small commission if you purchase through this link.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.