‘She drinks coffee until she can drink wine and then she goes to sleep so that she can wake up and drink coffee until she can drink wine again. Is this not the story of every mother? she asks herself.’

Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby.

Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a ‘book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays’, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. ‘It’s not what she says,’ writes Edmeades, ‘but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.’

Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 212
Imprint: Otago University Press
Publication date: 18/09/2025

Staff review

Hiding Places
By Lynley Edmeades
Review by Rosa

Hiding Places is a clever combination of some of my favourite elements to devour in word form: the confining expectations of womanhood, the passing of time, and an experimental form that takes just as much puzzling as the “story” itself. Within this beautifully bizarre book, Lynley Edmeades fictionalises her experience of becoming a mother in bite-size vignettes, underpinned by the framework of the 1913 Plunket manual, Feeding and Care of Baby by Frederic Truby King. She flickers between historical excerpts, intertextual references, and correspondence with her loved ones and the writer-mother she obsesses over. These are peppered with redacted text, anonymised characters, concertinaed perspectives and timelines that simultaneously complement and agitate each other.

All this sounds bewilderingly sporadic and avant-garde, yet it’s a joy to read and the calculated effect is brilliant. Every word demonstrates Edmeades’ refusal for her work as a writer AND mother to be critically compartmentalised, and her rejection of the idea that parents are incapable of doing both, and doing both well. Multiple things can be true at once. It is often impossible to fit the fragments together cleanly, but I loved the ‘mess’ and mind-boggle of it all.

While I had to hide Hiding Places from myself for the benefit of my final exam slog, I encourage everyone to seek it out as soon as possible. It was a pleasure to pick up, put down and mull over, and it made my brain implode in the best way: with a desire to read, write, and keep digging. For fans of Deborah Levy, Emilie Pine, Kate Zambreno and Rachel Cusk.