The definition of “mother” seems straightforward in the abstract, but in reality, the question is much more complicated. Motherhood is more than giving birth, and giving birth doesn’t automatically make someone motherly. In Saba Sams’s novel, Gunk, readers are taken on an exploration of the question of who gets to be a mother, and what is the cost of motherhood.
We meet Jules in the hours after the birth of her child as she’s feeding the baby colostrum through a syringe. It was collected from the birth mother. Mina, otherwise referred to as Nim throughout the novel, has walked out of the hospital after birthing the baby, leaving it in the care of Jules.
The novel takes us back a half dozen years to when Jules is a wayward young woman trying to figure out her life. She tells us how she meets, marries, and divorces Leon, who owns the eponymous club, Gunk, where she takes a job. Gunk is a divey Brighton dance club catering to students, and Leon is unable to turn a profit until Jules takes on the role of manager. Eventually, Nim enters their lives as a bartender, and over time, grows closer with Jules, ultimately trusting in her to raise the baby she doesn’t want.
Jules tells us early on she’s always wanted to be a mother, but having a child has proven a challenge. She’s had plenty of sex, and Leon isn’t one to use condoms, either with his wife or other women on the side. Nevertheless, Jules has not conceived a child of her own. Her desire to mother is apparent, and she takes on the role when she mothers Leon and Nim.
At times, both Leon and Nim find her care smothering. They push Jules away, often when they need her most.
Even though Leon is a middle-aged man, he often acts like a child. His mother, Rita, for instance, always sends him a gingerbread house kit at Christmas. He promptly eats the cookie and squirts the icing into his mouth, rather than following through with assembling the kit. He’s also a serial cheater while married to Jules, and there’s little to redeem him.
The relationship between Leon and Jules comes across as a bit thin. Why does she fall in love with him, and why does she stay with him? There’s not really a good explanation and his unlikeability seems like a weakness, as if he’s a one-dimensional villain. Partly this may stem from Jules as narrator, so we only ever see her perspective, but surely she has something good to say about the man she married for six years.
Jules does hypothesize the reason: “Perhaps I’d been coached, as a woman, to expect very little from men, to give more of myself in a relationship than my partner, to see marriage as an endurance test rather than a mutually valuable way to pass my life,” but even this charming feminist critique of the institution of marriage feels like a weak excuse for a sad little man.
Perhaps though these are the same reasons why Jules wants so badly to be a mother. Like her willingness to remain with a man who lacks any usefulness, she’s been taught to expect motherhood, and takes pleasure from caring for helpless people. For Jules, motherhood is the end, the goal, the cat that needs saving.
And while motherhood may be the goal for Jules, it’s the opposite for Nim. It’s the reason Nim is eager to hand over her unborn baby. She’s still young and hopeful and has ambitions. She’s unsure of where her life is headed, and wants to avoid the trap of motherhood.
The two women present these oppositional points of view in a way that feels almost as if Sams is debating the question herself, with two women representing incompatible ideals. Can neither have it all? Nim wants something other than motherhood, anything really, even if she doesn’t know what it is. With the baby approaching, she observes, “My parents lost themselves when they had me. Or, they lost the people they could have been.”
It’s a hard truth many parents face—how much of ourselves are we missing when we have children, what are we giving up? The question is one I’ve grappled with, which is perhaps, too, why I’m drawn to review books dealing with the question. I raised the question in last month’s review of Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon, where the question of parenting challenges the parent’s identity. I would, as a critic, be remiss to not acknowledge that perhaps the reading of this question into these texts is simply the result of my own inquiry.
In Gunk, though, we have a character with a very clear ambition to become a mother. Jules’s aspiration is fulfilled, but leaves her feeling different when it happens once she realizes the cost. She questions whether she can really ever be the child’s mother, and Nim’s disappearance after the birth causes Jules anguish she didn’t expect. She’s suddenly gotten what she always wanted, motherhood, with the cost of her relationships. So it seems, even when we get what we want, parenthood takes something from us.
Gunk is a fast-paced, compact novel that dives deep into questions of motherhood. Sams has offered a concise story with a hyper focus. The tradeoff is the succinct text has few other extraneous subplots. It’s a laser-focused narrative warning us that parenthood—motherhood, particularly—has a cost.
FICTION
by Saba Sams
Knopf
Published on March 5, 2026
