paperback, 240 pages
Published April 16, 2019 by Back Bay Books.
O'Connell is a smart twentysomething who treats her pregnancy like a new project, researching and planning. She envisions a natural birth and a year of wholesome breast feeding. But things do not go as she expects. Life throws curveballs, and after 40 hours of contractions, she opts for a C-section. She manages to nurse for a year but resents her baby's control over her body. This is not a book about the wonders of motherhood but about the tension between culturally inherited ideals and the realities of lived, bodily experience.
(This review is complicated by the fact that I know the writer and was very much there as we were both in the shit of new parenthood together.) As a new parent I kept looking for myself books about parenthood and failing to find me. This book talks about the physical and emotional experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and the first year of parenting in a way that’s honest and raw without being cliche.
