Things Inside Things is a collection of autofiction that revolves around a single mother and her two young daughters. It is at once an intimate account of single motherhood and an ode to, a call to arms for, the maternal bond as irreducible, sacred–the thing at the centre of all things. Made up of fragmentary scenes, poetic prose, and short stories, the narrative moves back and forth in time, across hemispheres, through shifting points of view and recurrent characters painting readers into the living and breathing layers of one single mother’s experience and world. Taking inspiration from writers Katherine Mansfield and Lucia Berlin, Things Inside Things bucks linear plot convention for a form that is voiced, sensory and shaped by the physicality of emotion. If this is a collection that advocates for the joy, reward and importance of the mother-child bond it is also one in which that bond does not come easy. Inside the walls and skin of these stories a mother seeks help for chronic maternal anxiety, navigates the loss of relationship break down with her children’s father, holds space for paternal and cultural ties that must span distance, be sustained over Zoom calls, and navigates the emotional and material weight of mothering alone. Above all this is body of work that seeks to hold ordinary, domestic days to the light. That pays homage to the everyday maternal and relational moments of connection, rupture and repair that shape who we are and can–if we let them–transform us. These are not stories of martyrdom. Rather, they give us motherhood as a creative, radical and transcendent force. Where a daughter’s ‘sturdy seven-year-old legs with downy hairs intact and lit up are holier than all the Gods of all religions’, where female friendship is a haven of ‘light, smile lines, vast and loyal as the seasons’ and within which we witness a mother, a woman, a writer finding herself on the page.