Conceived as a direct address from a mother to her daughter, Child Support is a work of narrative non-fiction that moves between New York and London in the aftermath of a cross-border divorce. It’s not a story of romantic collapse, but of what happens when care, money and law collide – when love is no longer enough and everything tender must learn the language of value. 

Combining intimate memoir and poetry with cultural observation, the book aims to tell a story of custody, migration, debt and class inside legal systems that turn love into percentages, freedom into jurisdiction and care into numbers on a page. Following the writer as she settles with her daughter into a new life in London after 12 years in the US, the book seeks to explore how care is valued in a world that rewards productivity, profit and data, but still relies on invisible, unpaid labour to raise the next generation. 

What makes the idea distinctive is the book’s synthesis of forms and its narrative urgency. It will be both an intimate account of leaving New York and arriving in London, and a meditation on how mothering in each city is shaped by the politics, economies and cultures that surround it. It will combine lived scenes in the two cities – a pub room rented by the hour, a child’s nap in a new bed, a phone ping announcing child support – with reflections on welfare systems, custody law, feminist economics and the cost of living. 

This is not a tell-all memoir about winning or losing a divorce. It is about what happens when care enters the market – and asks how a society decides what a child’s life is worth. The narrative shows how, when families fracture, the cost of raising children does not disappear: it is redistributed unevenly, with long-term consequences for stability, dignity and possibility.

Stylistically, Child Support aims to adopt a direct address to the author’s daughter, creating a narrative that is both tender and unsparing. The voice will be reflective, ironic, politically lucid and emotionally grounded. The book will not argue from ideology but from felt experience: what it feels like to be priced, assessed, judged, supported, constrained and partially saved by systems that are not complete. It aims to be a literary exploration of form and intent, inspired by Eula Biss, Helen Cixous and David Malouf, employing direct address and other devices to convey both the intimacy and dislocation of parenting in a capitalist world.

The need for this book arises from lived contradictions that are increasingly common: women doing the majority of unpaid care work while being judged by their “earning power”; mothers navigating legal systems that monetise relationships; families split across borders by visa regimes, courts and unequal economies. While motherhood is culturally idealised, the labour that sustains it remains structurally undervalued. Child Support comes from inside that contradiction, in the space Helene Cixous calls jouissance: the lived excess of care, intimacy and dependency that cannot be fully measured, priced or contained by economic systems.

At heart, Child Support aims to explore what it takes to raise a child inside an economy that increasingly measures value in productivity, data and profit. It will insist that care, time and protection are not sentimental extras but the conditions of freedom. In telling one family’s story across two cities, the book hopes to offer a wider reckoning with how capitalism shapes the most intimate parts of life – and what it costs when it does.

Excerpt:

“I think of my grandmother’s soft wrinkly hands, the way I’d examine the back of them, gazing at the age spots as though they were stars in the sky. We’d sit in her garden by the lagoon counting the ducks waddle in and out of the water, rehearsing a small, unimportant ballet. We waited there, quietly, for the world to find us.

Often, it never did.

Well before you were born, around the time I counted ducks with my grandmother, childhood was still spoken about as something separate from the market. There was a story we liked to tell ourselves: that children had been rescued from labour, lifted out of the machinery of work, and placed somewhere softer – inside the home, inside sentiment, inside love. Writers and historians like Viviana Zelizer describe how, in the post-industrial world, children were reimagined as “priceless”: no longer valued for what they could produce, but for what they meant. Emotionally central. Economically untouchable. We told ourselves that childhood was beyond money, it lived in the spaces where time shifted slowly, by the lagoon; and even as the cost of raising a child rose quietly year by year, folded into rent, schooling, healthcare, childcare, opportunity, we tried, still, to believe in this ancient prayer. This was the paradox that came to shape modern family life: you were declared beyond price, yet every part of your becoming was mediated by it. You were not supposed to belong to the market, but the market followed you everywhere, like the ducklings with their own mothers.

I believed in that story, at least for a while. I wanted to believe that love could stand outside economics, that motherhood could exist in a register untouched by ledgers and invoices. But that boundary – between childhood and the marketplace – has not held. It has thinned, dissolved, grown sharp, like the Bindii eyes in the grass of my grandmother’s garden. 

As Shoshana Zuboff writes, we are now living inside a new phase of capitalism, one in which human experience itself is mined as data, where prediction and behavioural modelling become the primary commodities. In this world, childhood is no longer sheltered. The home is quietly instrumented by platforms that track what we watch, buy, search for, and say. The school is mediated by educational technologies that measure attention, performance, aptitude, compliance. Even play – your games, your friendships, your curiosity – is increasingly monetised through apps, metrics, surveillance. What once felt private is now legible. What once felt spontaneous is now patterned, recorded, optimised.

All I want for you is to touch grass.

So you are not growing up in the same moral economy I was promised. You are no longer merely a protected dependent, nor simply a future worker. You are, from the beginning, a data subject in formation: a set of behaviours being observed, a profile being shaped, a life being rendered predictable before you can fully speak for yourself. 

Please touch grass.

This is the quiet shift of our time. Value is no longer located in what a person produces, but in how measurable, legible, and governable a life can become. Not labour, but predictability. Not output, but pattern. And this is why I keep returning to money, to systems, to child support, even when it feels cold to do so. Because in a world like this, stability, time, care, and protection are not just comforts. They are the conditions of freedom itself. A child who grows up without them does not simply lose resources; they lose future adaptability. They become easier to sort, easier to manage, easier to absorb into systems that have already decided how a life should behave.

Touch grass, at least for a few minutes a day.

I want you to understand this not because I want you to be afraid, but because I want you to be awake. We were told that children had been removed from the marketplace but who was doing the telling. Because you are not outside it. You are becoming part of its future infrastructure, a node in its insidious design. And this is why I write to you about money, about law, about care, about what is transferred between adults in your name. Child support, in this sense, is not just an arrangement between parents. It is a small, imperfect refusal of the idea that your future should be shaped by scarcity, by data, or by the quiet arithmetic of who can afford to nurture possibility and who cannot. You, but not others, sadly. I am trying, in my flawed duckling way, to insist that your and your peers becoming should not be governed by what is easiest to measure, but by what is hardest to quantify: time, attention, dignity, and the right to grow at your own pace, beyond the market’s expectations.

Inhabit the empty, ungovernable spaces.

Because what is missing from all these calculations – from the tables of costs, the percentages, the forecasts – is the space in between. The lived density of care. The excess that refuses to sit neatly inside numbers. I think here of Hélène Cixous, and her idea of jouissance: not pleasure as reward, but an overflowing intensity that exceeds measure, ownership and exchange. I once used the word to power my playwriting, to describe moments when bodies, voices or relationships would not stay in their assigned places. Motherhood lives in that register. So does childhood. The value of raising a child does not reside only in what can be itemised – rent, food, school fees, percentages transferred between accounts – but in what leaks beyond them: the closeness that cannot be invoiced, the time that cannot be reclaimed, the attention that multiplies rather than depletes. 

This is the value that systems strain to contain and never fully can. Child support attemtps to capture a fraction of it, stabilises an edge, names a responsibility. But the real economy of a child’s life – the one that makes freedom possible – happens in the excess, in the uncounted, in the forms of care that refuse equivalence. It is there, in that unmeasurable space, that your life is actually being made. But sadly, now, to fully inhabit that space, one needs time. For time, one needs money. It is so cruel.

I implore you, go outside and touch grass. Watch the ducklings. Turn off your phone. Count the age spots on the back of my aging hands.”

About the writer

I am a writer, journalist and narrative strategist working across literary nonfiction, screenwriting and journalism. My work has consistently focused on the intersection of personal experience, social systems and power: how money, law, gender and culture shape intimate life.

I trained originally as a playwright and later worked as a screenwriter, developing feature films and television projects in the US, UK and Australia for Gate Television, Aquarius Films and Macmillan Entertainment in New York. I have written and co-written multiple screenplays, including a Jane Austen adaptation optioned and developed by a UK production company, along with other original features and television pilots. This background has shaped my narrative voice: structurally precise, character-driven and attentive to how systems are experienced in daily life.

Alongside my creative work, I have written journalism and long-form commentary on post-divorce finance, culture, politics, technology and economics, and have worked professionally as a senior editor and head of content in digital and media organisations. My professional career has centred on translating complex structural issues – policy, technology, power, institutional design – into accessible public narratives. This combination of lived experience, editorial training and systems thinking directly informs Child Support, which blends memoir with social and economic analysis.

I have also spoken publicly and written about motherhood, work, care, inequality and women’s economic precarity, drawing on both personal experience and research. My writing style is literary but grounded, inspired by authors such as Joan Didion, Ursula Le Guin, Annie Ernaux and Eula Biss – writers who fuse the personal with the political without sacrificing narrative clarity.

Child Support emerges from a life lived across legal systems and national economies: navigating a cross-border divorce, raising a child as a single mother in two of the world’s most influential cities and confronting first-hand how law, welfare, employment structures and markets determine how care is calculated. My authority to write this book comes not only from research but from experience inside the very systems the book interrogates: family courts, visa regimes, welfare offices, employment markets and the invisible economies of motherhood.

This book is the culmination of long-term creative work and intellectual inquiry into capitalism, care and the value of human life. It is both personal and public in its ambition: a literary memoir with the analytical depth of social criticism, written for a general readership.