I've just finished reading The Hand that First Held Mine, by Maggie O'Farrell (at last) and her portrayal of the alien landscape of new motherhood completely blew me away. She perfectly captures the sense of being displaced from the centre of your own life, the dragging exhaustion and the transfiguring, drenching feeling of love, which combine to make being a mother for the first time such a confounding and elating experience.
As you can see, it spoke eloquently to me, reflecting my own experience back at me, creating that spark of recognition and empathy that draws a reader into a narrative - the prime duty of a writer - so it was extremely instructive in that sense.
There were other lessons here as well. O'Farrell writes crystalline prose. Each page yields delight -- she talks about "a sting of pleasure" and it is easy to be stung by a phrase here, an image there; I'm very susceptible and I was quickly seduced. What stops her work from being just artistry (it's so tempting to indulge in luscious and flashy writing if you have an aptitude for it) is precisely the fact that she doesn't write for show, her work is suffused with great washes of emotion and it is this that gives it resonance and meaning.
That's what she illuminated for me -- the need to harness your talent to the story you are telling, rather than using the story as a vehicle to display your skill. The first may conceivably enable you to produce good fiction, the second runs the risk of being merely narcissistic.
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