The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

Emma Knight is an author and entrepreneur who lives in Toronto with her husband and family. She worked as a journalist and started a beverage company called Greenhouse while raising her two daughters. Though The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is her first novel, she wrote two cookbooks before publishing fiction. The author describes the cookbook titled How to Eat With One Hand as a meditation on motherhood. She has also spoken extensively about the fact that the setting and themes of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus are inspired by her own life. She studied at the University of Edinburgh as an undergraduate and says, “For me, it was the idea of adventure that attracted me. And the moodiness of the city of Edinburgh, its beauty, its architectural gloriousness” (“The Octopus Metaphor.” CBC Bookends). Her love of Edinburgh is vividly portrayed in the novel’s setting.

Knight also states that the octopus metaphor at the heart of the novel is inspired by her own experiences of motherhood, and she is particularly captivated by the idea that the female octopus dies and sacrifices herself for her young, literally allowing her offspring to feed on her body. According to Knight, this idea of motherhood is “a Loch Ness Monster that [mothers] can torture ourselves with […] this image of the perfect mother, the one who sacrifices everything” for her children (“The Octopus Metaphor”). This theme is explored in the novel, but Knight says that she also had to grapple with these ideas in her own life. For her, carving out space to write fiction was a way of reclaiming her personhood as well as showing her daughters that there were different ways to be a mother. As she asserts, “I realized I needed to get back to writing to set an example about how to be. If you do something in the margins of your life and then you have kids, the margins disappear. You either sacrifice that thing or find a way to prioritize” (Counter, Rosemary. “Love Is a Many-Tentacled Thing.” The Zoomer Book Club, 9 Jan. 2025). In her own life, she believes that balancing parenting with creative pursuits allows her to be a better parent and a better person.