Hannah Silva

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My Child, the Algorithm

"Bold and inventive . . . I loved it" IRENOSEN OKOJIE "Raises the stakes for the rest of us writers" ISABEL WAIDNER "Silva's book asks all the right questions" JOANNA WALSH Writer and performer Hannah Silva interrogates her life with the input of two unreliable narrators - an algorithm and a toddler. Her living exploration of undoing and redoing love and motherhood, and specifically queer single motherhood, unravels everything she has been taught to want and explores alternative ways of thinking, loving and parenting today. As she navigates friendship, dating and life as a single mum in London, the algorithm and toddler encourage flights of imagination and infinite mischief. Hannah and the algorithm play with language as the toddler plays with playdoh, building shapes, moulding rainbows. Hannah writes and re-writes herself and her child, who every night asks 'tell me a story about me.' Both toddler and algorithm veer her story in unexpected directions - 'no, this way mummy!' - with a playful curiosity that injects humour and insight into the author's life as she negotiates being one of two mothers and questions how she has lived and loved in the past. With the help of the algorithm, Hannah deconstructs love, and reconstructs it too, through friendships and parenting. She questions our society, so built around the unit of the nuclear family, and a universal credit system that is impossible for any single parent to get out off - unless they move in with a partner. Queer, honest, thoughtful, sexy and compassionate, My Child, the Algorithm is non-fiction at its finest.