“And I Always Will”, by Claire Kilroy (original title “Soldier Sailor”), is a difficult novel to pigeonhole: it talks about motherhood without being a manual and enters into the living matter of the first “invasion” months, when the house is filled with new and unusual objects for new parents; we have pages of broken hours, of a new language and of fatigue, fear and judgement. But also of love. The protagonist narrates this experience from within, with a voice that seems to run and stop at the same time, as happens when you live on alert and try to stay clear.
The book was among the most discussed in the English-speaking area on the topic and made it to the shortlist of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024. The reason lies in its formal, radical and readable choice at the same time: a monologue addressed to the son who, in reality, ends up questioning the world around him. It doesn’t explain “how it feels”, but shows how one becomes a mother. And what price does that transformation demand, in terms of loneliness, desire, reputation, identity.
A novel in the second person
Kilroy’s most powerful idea is simple on paper and very difficult to make work. The text speaks to the child, almost without respite. That “you” creates an absolute intimacy, and at the same time produces a precise estrangement: the newborn does not respond, does not argue, does not console. The tongue then becomes an umbilical cord and a handle, a way to hold together what risks fraying.
There is also an interesting downside to this choice. Speaking to those who have no words necessarily means also speaking to those who use words to measure and judge. The novel becomes a continuous reverse shot of the “outside”: the advice, the expectations, the performance required of a mother to remain presentable, efficient, grateful.
“Soldier Sailor” as a moral image
The original title moves motherhood beyond the domestic setting. Soldier and Sailor are two symbolic figures, mother and son as a couple moving within a broader geography. On the one hand there is daily resistance, on the other a boundless promise that coincides with a concrete power: rewriting the life of those who hold you in their arms.
This “epic” vibration always remains anchored to a minimal plot. The book works on the aftermath, on the immediacy. Scenes at home, routines that still have no form, attempts to “do well”, small hours. And in the middle the thought that runs, returns, stumbles, rages on. It is here that many critical readings have recognized the strength of the novel: emotional intensity and stylistic control go hand in hand, without becoming an exercise.
A prose that stings and then caresses
“And I always will” alternates tenderness and sarcasm with a nervous, almost musical rhythm. Kilroy brings together two impulses that are often separated in the rhetoric of motherhood: love as an absolute force and care as continuous alarm. The text manages to render that paradox without paint, with an irony that resembles oxygen and with a ferocity that resembles truth.
A review in the “Guardian” insisted precisely on this point: experience becomes literature without being domesticated, and writing restores dignity to what, in the public narrative, often ends up in a polished, edifying, “presentable” version.
Motherhood as a public measure
The core of the novel does not revolve around the question “is it good or difficult”. Kilroy works on a sharper question: what motherhood does to the idea of oneself, when constant surveillance is triggered around oneself.
Being a mother, here, becomes a public measure. Of character, morality, endurance. And while we evaluate things outside, inside we fight a silent war made up of interrupted sleep and expectations. Maternal love does not appear as a pacified feeling: it invades, ignites, sometimes scares. And it brings with it a particular isolation, because the world continues to demand presence, brilliance, normality, even as the protagonist experiences a total and physical change.
In that short circuit we recognize the book. There is no symbolic mother, but a person who tries to remain whole while everything rewrites her.
What the critics outside Italy say
The Women’s Prize shortlist amplified the novel’s resonance, presenting it as a text capable of speaking about identity and transformation with an immediacy that does not renounce literary ambition.
Alongside the enthusiasm, there have also been useful reservations. “El País”, for example, interpreted the lyrical and hyperbolic component as a double-edged sword: on the one hand the tenderness that almost becomes prayer, on the other the risk of a construction that is too recognizable, too “programmed”. It is an objection that opens up an interesting issue without the need for sentences. When writing about motherhood, how much form does the experience take before becoming a filter?
Who is Claire Kilroy and why this book matters
Claire Kilroy is an Irish writer who has also crossed theater and screenplay. Before “Soldier Sailor” she published novels such as “All Names Have Been Changed” and “Tenderwire”, building a reputation as an author capable of combining social observation and stylistic nerve. In “And I will always do it” you can feel this double nature: almost scenic precision in objects and times, and a work of phrase that seeks vibration, singing, hammering.
Part of the critical reception insists on the fact that this novel arrives after years and seems written with a need on it. Not as a slogan, just as a sensation of matter that asked for a form.
A closure that can also please those who “look from the outside”
“And I always will” does not ask for mandatory identification. It can speak to those who have experienced motherhood, and it can also speak to those who observe it from the outside, because it focuses on a universal theme disguised as everyday life: what happens when life demands everything, immediately, and forces you to change your identity while the world continues to ask you to remain recognisable.
In the end, a different posture remains while reading, as if each sentence had weight. Motherhood emerges as vertigo and the craft of the body, as love and isolation, as promise and alarm. And above all, a rare thing emerges: a mother who becomes a person again, with all her contradiction. Inside that person, without the need for proclamations, we can glimpse an entire society.
