Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s Book of Hours is a visceral novel about birth, motherhood, faith, and the uneasy relationship between women and the institutions meant to care for them. Following an unnamed protagonist through pregnancy, labor, and its aftermath, the novel draws on Catholic saints, medieval mythology, and magical thinking to explore what happens when bodily autonomy, belief, and identity begin to fracture.
I spoke with Whittet about writing from personal trauma, the strange transformation of becoming a mother, and finding magic and faith in experiences that can be both beautiful and brutal.
Lindsey Williams: As a mother and as someone who has gone through the IVF process, this book feels so important and cathartic for those who have had traumatic births or experienced medical trauma. Thank you for bringing this novel to light.
I want to start off by asking about the protagonist – can you tell me more about your choice to leave her unnamed? I loved the effect it had as I followed her life: the transition from “the girl” to “the woman” to “the mother.”
Ellen O’Connell Whittet: When I first started drafting this novel I left her unnamed because I had no idea what to call her. I always find it hard to name characters — I think about all the interesting, quirky, specific things I know about real people, and I want the people I invent to feel just as 3D. So if the protagonist wasn’t me, exactly, what on earth would I call her? I used “the woman” as a placeholder just to get through the draft.
Except once I’d gone through some revisions, I found I really liked the effect. If she was anonymous, it felt like people could take what they needed from her experience, which was sort of the whole point. I could project myself into her, but so could my friends who’d had lovely, textbook pregnancies and births. Because somewhere between fertility and pregnancy and birth and postpartum, something gets taken from everyone.
The anonymity also gave me distance because she’s not me, and she’s not anyone I know either. She’s an archetype in the delivery room. And that archetype kept shifting under her: “the woman” became “the mother,” which is its own kind of demotion. It reminded me of when nurses started calling me “Mama” the second my own babies were born. I wasn’t Ellen anymore, I was Mama, same as anyone else, and there was something kind of creepy about it. No one had ever called me that before, and suddenly everyone was. I wanted the name changes in the book to carry some of that same uncanniness.
LW: This book deals with such heavy themes: identity and autonomy, religious trauma, medical trauma, societal expectations of women and mothers. Did you know from the jump that you wanted to intertwine these themes into one novel?
EOCW: Not at all. I wanted to just write about the various experiences of giving birth. And sadly, in this country, that so often comes with all the themes and baggage you just named. In a first draft, I usually write scenes without a thesis, but I had a memory of giving birth and feeling like I was being burned at the stake, like I’d survived my own martyrdom. That’s what pulled me into the story as I was processing it.
I was also just being radicalized by becoming a mother in America, during a global pandemic, and realizing how much I had to fight for any support or care, while also reckoning with my shifting role, my body, my baby, my own trauma. We live under systems that traumatize us by design. To me, there’s no way to write honestly about the rawness of motherhood without naming the forces that make it harder — and at the same time, that profound ego death that comes with your first baby just knocked me flat out. I was trying to wade through all of it as honestly as I could.
LW: You explore themes of spiritual doubt and religious trauma here, delving deep into Catholic saints. What was your research process like?
EOCW: Beyond 12 years of Catholic school and the standard rites of first communion and confirmation, I’m fascinated by what faith looks like in 2026. Saints always held a special place for me too. They were such a living, breathing part of my childhood education. In school we wrote reports on the saints we were named for, or whose names we took in confirmation. My dad also used to play this game with my brother and me in churches and art museums, asking if we could identify saints by their iconography, which is very nerdy. I loved it. I knew certain saints were often depicted with the means of their martyrdom, or with their particular patronages, as a way to identify them. I’m still very attuned to that.
But also, saints were real flesh-and-blood people chafing against systems of oppression, both within and outside the Catholic Church. Their struggles were, in a way, more human and easier to understand than the struggles of Jesus — we know more about their actual lives, because inn many cases, we have their writings and records.
After my first draft, I was talking about the book with my dear friend and favorite editor, Kirsten Reach, who’d just read it. She suggested it needed another layer. That’s when I found a wonderful article by Katherine Allen Smith in Church History about a pilgrim at Mont Saint Michel who went into labor when the tides came in, and the two saints who helped her — the Virgin Mary as midwife, and Saint Michael, in another version of the myth, turning away with a kind of paternalistic modesty to give her privacy as she gave birth. For someone who loves medieval mythology, saints, and birth, this story had it all. I ordered the actual book the article referenced, in a modern French translation, and made my way through it very ploddingly. By giving my protagonist this same translation project, I let her be plodding too — but as earnest as I was. I didn’t have to pretend to be an expert. Just a woman who related to all the hard circumstances in which people have given birth and felt like they might die.
This is so hard to answer. I wrote a first draft one fall, in about three months, in the evenings mostly, or mornings I didn’t teach, while my daughter was at daycare. Then I went back in and added the pilgrim thread. Then I revised it to send to agents. Once I had an agent, I went through a few more rounds of revision. So, somewhere between three months and two years, depending on where you start counting.
It felt like it came pouring out of me, though I’d been quietly thinking about it for two years before I ever wrote a word. And at first I thought I was writing nonfiction. Once I realized I wasn’t, I had a lot more freedom to play with the elements I’d already put on the page.
LW: This book feels like it came from a deeply personal place. My own copy has passages highlighted and annotations on nearly every other page. In particular, I found this line regarding your protagonist striking: “It was both comforting and agonizing to let her body write this story.” How did you find a balance; care for yourself while writing something so unrelenting?
EOCW: I don’t think I did, at the time. I had PTSD from giving birth, but I didn’t know that yet because I got the diagnosis during my second pregnancy, though I think the signs were there in the saintly hallucinations I was writing, in my own terror, my intrusive thoughts, my dissociation. I wish I had known how I was suffering. And I wish I could say it was writing this book that helped me most, but in reality, it was having a corrective experience in my second birth.
There’s a lot I don’t share with the protagonist — our families, jobs, goals, and some of our backgrounds are all quite different. But the birth is absolutely my birth. That was the one thing I couldn’t change. Someone who read an early draft asked why that birth — why not, say, a c-section gone wrong, or a hemorrhage, or a NICU stay — but I’m not the right writer for those experiences. I don’t know how it feels to live through terrors that are related to mine but not the same. What I know is what it’s like to be assaulted by a doctor, to lose total control of your body in the process. That’s been the story of my life, in a way — being in a room full of people while things were done to me that I couldn’t stop, that no one could stop, and then being handed my beautiful, perfect baby at the end, and not recognizing her.
It always helps, when I’m reading or writing difficult things, to be with my family. My kids have a gift for pulling me into the present. I also try to consume things that are easy on my nervous system; I pay close attention to it anyway. But when I’m writing something new, I get completely obsessed, and mostly I just have to ride it out.
LW: I love the use of “magical thinking” in its varied degrees, from “harmless” to more dire and intense coping mechanisms. From my personal experience as an IVF mother myself, it almost feels like I had to use varying levels of magical thinking to get through such a prolonged and invasive medical trauma, pregnancy, and labor. These tiny thoughts made this novel feel so immersive; your protagonist so real. How did you collect these thoughts?
EOCW: For me, part of religion is magical thinking, so I must have been collecting these things my whole life. But people also come out of the woodwork when you’re trying to have a baby. I had people give me crystals, light candles, offer me mantras and visuals, and one old friend rubbed my belly with water from Lourdes. Sometimes it felt like I could make it happen through sheer force of wanting it.
The same was true during labor, which takes such mental focus. I went so deep into myself — I talked to ancestors and my future children, to my mother in my mind; I met myself at the end of a long, dark hallway, and at the center of a labyrinth. I’ve never experienced anything so intense. It really feels like the opposite of dying, the places you journey to and come back from. And then you have to be completely present for the baby at the end, and there’s no one to turn to and say, oh my GOD, that was wild; where did I even go?
People always have some capacity for magical thinking, no matter how logical or cynical we think we are. My husband is a scientist, but he and I both believe he’s fully psychic. I’m a very practical person too, but I’m also superstitious, and a little desperate to have faith in things and people. I’ll always reach for prayer, often out of pure muscle memory. If I lose something, I pray to Saint Anthony, even though he doesn’t always come through. It’s just a habit left over from childhood, but it’s a very deep pathway in my brain. It delights me to find out everyone else’s most magical, illogical, miraculous beliefs and practices.
LW: Music plays a role here, from mentions of reggae albums to liturgical chants. What did you listen to while writing?
EOCW: I can’t listen to music while I’m actually writing, but it’s very much part of the process when I’m thinking through a scene beforehand. Music isn’t casual for me. I never just have it on in the background, though my husband does. I grew up playing piano and still play in the evenings, even though I’m not very good. It completely changes my brain and body when I do it. I lose myself; it feels almost like time travel.
When I do listen, usually when I’m walking, driving, or running, I need to really hear the lyrics. If I don’t understand them, I look them up. That same attentiveness carries into how I think about liturgical music. Liturgy, in general, is essential to me. I think it has to be a sensory experience, with the gorgeous churches, the incense, the music. So music becomes part of the whole sensory experience of worship. My reaction to it isn’t intellectual at all — it just makes me feel things deeply, which matters a lot for making art.
The strings of this novel tie together beautifully in the end. What do you hope readers take away from this story?
EOCW: That means so much, thank you! I hope readers take away the beauty and the brutality of giving birth, that it can be both at once. I hope they take away some sense of their own capacity for magic, and for faith in themselves. And I hope they come away distrustful, in a useful way, of how much our institutions shape what we believe, even when those beliefs end up harming us, including what we’re taught to accept about our own bodies in medical settings.
Mostly, though, if people who’ve already given birth read this, I hope they recognize themselves somewhere in it. I hope they feel less crazy, less broken, and like they’re part of an unfortunate collection of people who had violent experiences meeting the loves of their lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ellen O’Connell Whittet is an essayist and continuing lecturer who teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her debut novel, Book of Hours (Dzanc), is forthcoming in 2026. Her memoir, What You Become in Flight (Melville House, 2020) was named a most-anticipated book by Refinery 29 and Chicago Review. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She co-hosts the podcast Good Moms on Paper with writers Annie Hartnett and Tessa Fontaine.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Lindsey Williams is a writer, former librarian, and Writers House Intern Program alum. Her work has appeared in publications including Book Riot, The Nerd Daily, and Rescripted. In her personal reading life, she gravitates toward literary fiction & horror – in both cases, the weirder the better. She lives in Arizona with her husband & daughter.