Since resigning she has been replaced by the giggling line-fluffing Fiona Phillips

Since resigning, she has been replaced by the giggling, line-fluffing Fiona Phillips.FAME PROSPECTS: Miss Turner was once a Blue Peter presenter, and cheerfully models for Littlewoods catalogue. Despite her racing green MG and wraparound shades, she somehow belongs firmly in the cosy-yet-over-lit-studio-with- couches environment. Even her latest misdemeanour only makes her minutely more interesting One predicts Judith Chalmers-style faintly fading prospects. Our heroine could, however, become a God Squad fund-raiser, mother of triplets, or gently-does-it exercise guru.. WORK and parenthood are an increasingly uneasy mix; a fact that is making publishers up and down the land lick their lips and rub their hands with glee. The angst and the anguish of career mothers and fathers is heralding an exceptional book bonanza, as titles pour off the presses.

Just who are the victims of the current crisis of confidence among parents isn’t clear. Is it the children, neglected and left with the nanny? The mothers, frantically booting up their laptops with one hand and making Marmite soldiers with the other? The fathers, hopelessly excluded from their offsprings’ childhood by the pressures of supporting the whole edifice financially and keeping their male end up in the office? All three? No matter: all this guilt makes excellent reading British writers have finally, in a rush, found their voice. While established American authors like Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia are still doing the rounds, their latest work has not struck the same chord in this country as it did in the Eighties, when the themes were getting women into the boardroom and putting reluctant New Men in touch with their parental feelings. “It seems like a logical step after all the American books,” says a spokesman for Jonathan Cape, publisher of Melissa Benn’s Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood. “No-one has written in this way about motherhood up to now, as opposed to feminism. While the research is rigorous, Melissa’s book also has a great feeling for popular culture.” What started as a trickle has become a gush, and there is more in the pipeline; Jayne Buxton and Aminatta Forna both also have books on motherhood in preparation, for publication later this year. THE WOMEN
The old Cosmo notion of “having it all” is taking a battering among women writers.

The juggling of motherhood and career is the hottest topic around – perhaps because a number of prominent pundits on the subject have recently reproduced. And there is suddenly a strange ambivalence about being a whizz in the office and simultaneously a devoted parent. What goes around comes around: the new breed of young feminist writers with small children have all suddenly and vociferously found that they are absolutely knackered and that there are only 24 hours in each unforgiving day. As for the joyous bond between mother and tot, the latest vogue is telling it like it is – perineal tearing, sleep deprivation, cracked nipples, the lot (though of course it is all still Absolutely Worth It). And where are the men? Working late, poor things – but it’s not necessarily their own fault. Ire has mostly shifted from individual partners to overly-demanding bosses and government policies.

Below, a guide to the voices of the moment.Melissa Benn Journalist, novelist and essayist, daughter of Tony, mother of two small daughters, the first born when she was 37. Author of Madonna and Child, which looks at the lives of modern mothers, “glamourised and despised, sentimentalised and overlooked”. Looking for a new political stance “prepared to redistribute skill, time, money and love”. We need, she says, a new “moral ecology” – “one that recognises a limit to infinite expansion; of income power, ambition and consumption”. In other words: you can forget about having it all.Eileen Gillibrand & Jenny Mosley Each has three children.

Joint authors of When I Go To Work, I Feel Guilty: a Working Mother’s Guide to Sanity and Survival. Full of charts and quizzes to work out exactly how much guilt is being felt. Don’t give in to negative self-belief and concentrate on being positive (for example, rather than thinking “I’m sloppy and messy”, try “I might not meet my mother’s standards of cleanliness and hygiene but my home does not present a health hazard”).Kate Figes Writer and journalist, mother of two daughters, author of the rather ominously-titled Life After Birth: What Even Your Friends Won’t Tell You About Motherhood, “the first thoroughly honest book to chart the changes that motherhood brings” Far from starry-eyed. “Giving birth is like having a near-fatal car crash where you just manage to crawl out of the wreckage,” gasps one of her interviewees. “The shock that I was still alive was so great that I cried for half an hour.” Somewhat damping conclusion: for new mothers, “things can only get better”. Eek.Elizabeth Perle McKenna Formerly an extremely high-powered American publishing executive Now the author of When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore. Parity in the workplace, she argues, just makes women miserable.