Monica Murphy Lemoine, the latest author with a book out from my small press, is interviewed here by Tania Pryputniewicz on miscarriage, stillbirth, and putting humor into writing even when the subject is a painful one. 
Archive for the 'Books & News' Category
On Saturday, I had a table at San Francisco’s Anarchist Book Fair. I split the table with Corbin Lewars, whose new book, Creating a Life: The Memoir of a Mom and Writer in the Making, just came out with Catalyst Book Press (my small press).
We’d gone to an anarchist parents gathering on Thursday, where Corbin read from both the book and her zine, Reality Mom. One person had bought a copy of her zine, and several other copies had disappeared without being paid for. So I expected the day to be a wash. I figured the books would be too expensive and on topics that wouldn’t interest anybody. Besides, anarchists don’t have money, I told Corbin. They live in squats and pass out flyers that say things like, “If you’re not stealing from your boss, you’re letting your boss steal from you.”
But I was surprised. I sold out of all the copies of The Confessional that I had brought. “I think you found your audience,” Corbin told me as copy after copy disappeared from my table.
This has really never happened before, except when the book first came out and I had a book signing in my home town.
And we sold quite a few copies of both Creating a Life and Labor Pains and Birth Stories. There are a lot of midwives and doulas who are either anarchists or sympathetic, apparently.
What I find interesting about anarchists is how their philosophy of rugged individualism clashes with the very clear “code” dress that they all wear. Lots of black, lots of chains, lots of partially shaved heads, lots of tattoos, and, of course, the ubiquitous political statements that almost always included the word “fuck” somewhere on their clothes…..For example, I saw several people wearing a small pin that read, “Fuck hate.”
I spoke briefly with an anarchist parent who said that her daughter’s struggle is so different than hers. “I was always trying to stand out, to be an individual,” she said. “But X is always trying to fit in.”
I didn’t say it, but surrounded by anarchists, nobody stood out. It’s not being an individual if you’re adhering to some code….even an anarchist code.
When I was ten, we visited De Smet, South Dakota, one of the places where Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up. I visited recently, and they’ve created a really cheesy visitor’s center there with all kinds of activities and farm equipment that are not historically accurate. But in the 1980s, during my first visit, all you could see was the Surveyor’s House from By the Shores of Silver Lake, the property with the 5 trees that Pa planted, and the house Pa built in town many years later. There was lots of “scope for imagination” (as Anne of Green Gables fame always used to say) and I came back from that trip and told my mother, “I’m going to be a writer when I grow up.” I didn’t have much money to buy a souvenir; all I could afford was a short slip of paper that included Laura Ingalls Wilder’s signature. I treasured that photocopied signature for many, many years, as a tangible connection to this writer I admired so much and whose life I envied. (Her life seemed so much more interesting than the tumbleweeds, dirt, dust, and broken-down trucks littering front yards in El Paso, Texas.)
A few years ago, I took a trip to Prince Edward Island to visit Anne’s land. Boy, was I ever disappointed. Maybe I expected to be transported back a century, to the time when L.M. Montgomery wrote about. But mostly, I was bored by the flat farmland; I was shocked that it took about an hour to traverse the island by car and then what was left to do?; and, most of all, I was disappointed by the clap-trap tourist stuff that has invaded that island and turned it into a mecca of cheap souvenirs and crappy Anne-related paraphernalia.
And, by the way, L.M. Montgomery never once mentioned the ginormous mosquitoes everywhere, not in any of her books, all of which I have read.
The mystery is sort of gone once you visit a place and realize it’s nothing like what you read about in the books.
And yet….I still want to go to those places. The magic of the places I read about as a kid filled me with such longing.
What are the children’s books I’d love to be able to go back and read for the very first time again, to feel that mysterious urgent heartbeat against my ridge cage as I read, devouring buttered Saltines, licking the butter and salt off my fingers and losing myself in another time and place?
There are too many to name but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts. Here are a few on my list:
Stuart Little by E.B. White
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare
My interview with Ariel Gore on women, happiness, and self-determination appears today on The Feminist Review. Gore’s new book BLUEBIRD: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness hits the stands today. Please check it out!
Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict
by Irene Vilar (www.irenevilar.com)
Other Press, 2009, $15.95
Irene Vilar’s second memoir explores a part of her life that she left out of her first memoir entirely—the fifteen abortions she had over the course of fifteen years.
Twelve of those abortions were pregnancies with the same man, a former professor, a man more than thirty years older, who became her lover when she was still a teenager. 
Ultimately, he became her husband and, as she refers to him, her “master.” She wanted a baby every time she conceived—an average of every 8 months, with the exception of a year and a half when she was working on her first memoir and remembered to take birth control pills—but knew that she had to choose between her life and her love. “Pregnant, my life felt less-sub-human,” she writes. Yet from the beginning, her husband had told her how “women’s desires for children killed each one of his love stories” (p. 51). Vilar knew that if she ever decided not to terminate one of her pregnancies, she would be terminating the relationship instead. “If you are grown up enough to have a child, you are just as fit to be a single mother,” he told her. “But I will not be a victim of your displacement” (83).
She saw each pregnancy as a “death sentence” for the relationship but also “a chance to rise above it, and above him” (79). Yet each time, she chose to end the pregnancy instead of the relationship. Vilar suggests she was addicted to abortion, but I would argue she was addicted to this particular man, a cruel master who cared more for his own comfort than for the woman he spent so many years “loving.” On the other hand, if she was addicted to the man, she never would have jeopardized the relationship so often by becoming pregnant, so perhaps she is on target when she admits that the cycle of pregnancy-and-abortion fed some destructive need. She felt validated, even “aroused,” by each pregnancy, panicked by the possible demise of her relationship, and simultaneously relieved and empty whenever she had an abortion.
Throughout the story, Vilar explores the ways her mother’s suicide when she was 8 left her feeling abandoned and homeless, linking that incident to her own struggles as an adult. She talks about her family’s propensity to addiction—her mother’s addiction to Valium, her father’s addiction to gambling and alcohol, her brothers’ addictions to heroin, and her own to abortion. She explores the damage done to her psyche at a young age but she fails to link her feelings of abandonment to her willingness to submit herself—body, mind, and soul—to a man in his fifties when she was only 17. She fails to acknowledge the betrayal of the feminist movement, which has fought (and continues to fight) for women’s right to an “out” when they find themselves with an untenable pregnancy but which has never provided a sufficient structure for dealing with the psychological and physiological damage of abortion, particularly repeat abortions. And what of the many doctors, family members, and friends who sat back and watched as Vilar tried to destroy her own body? Vilar lets them off the hook without much protest.
Vilar’s story is not one for the faint-hearted, nor is it for adamant pro-life or pro-choice advocates. The questions surrounding Vilar’s multiple pregnancies, her legal right to choose, her recognition of and desire for the many lives conceived within her womb but whose voices were silenced before they were even heard are necessarily messy questions. Vilar’s life is a chaotic, disordered one and she doesn’t shy away from showing just how confused she was for most of her adult life. One of the truths her story demonstrates is that by insisting on the right to “sex on demand” with whomever and whenever we want, protected from all physical consequences like pregnancy, we have forgotten that sex carries with it incredible power, a power which can be abused and a power which can be destructive. Vilar’s husband was guilty of abusing that power. Whether Vilar was ever conscious of abusing that power is hard to say; it’s certainly possible to question whether a 17-year-old girl, suffering from scars related to her mother’s suicide, separated from her surviving parent by thousands of miles, and involved in relationship with a man old enough to be her father, can exercise a completely conscious right to choose.
Ultimately, the line separating Vilar’s belief in her right to choose and her recognition of the life within is very, very thin—almost non-existent. When she is pregnant for the sixteenth time, a pregnancy she carries to term, she describes the ultrasound of her daughter taken eighteen weeks before she was born. “The ultrasound images show clearly a miniature head tilted back, an arm raised up, with the hand pointing back toward the face. It would have been possible and permissible to end her life at this point” (208).
Thus Vilar ends the final chapter of her book, completely blurring the line between pro-life and pro-choice politics as she recognizes her daughter’s existence and acknowledges the many times she had, in the past, exercised her right to choose.
Gore, Ariel. Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2010. $24.00.
The final scene of the 2008 indie flick Happy-Go-Lucky encapsulates one of the core problems presented in Ariel Gore’s new book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness.
Poppy and her roommate Zoe are rowing a boat in the middle of a pond. Poppy has just spent a harrowing afternoon with her psycho driving instructor, who blames Poppy for the complete and utter ruination of his potential love life, quite possibly his career.
“I think I should give up smoking,” Zoe says.
“That’s a good idea,” Poppy says, with her trademark giggle. “What can I give up?”
“You can give up being too nice,” Zoe says, slightly exasperated.
Poppy laughs.
“Seriously!” Zoe insists. “You can’t make everyone happy!”
“There’s no harm in trying, though, is there?” Poppy asks.
Poppy clearly hasn’t learned her lesson. Throughout the course of the movie, this happy-go-lucky woman meets miserable person after miserable person, who try to convince her that there’s something wrong with her life because she’s, well, happy. And her best efforts to cheer them up, to help them see that life ain’t all that bad, are wasted. But thankfully, though she’s brought low for a few hours each time, she’s always able to bounce back up.
Poppy is one of the truly fortunate: she’s happy with the life she’s got. As she explains to her sister, “I love my life. Yeah, it can be tough at times, but that’s part of it, isn’t it? I’ve got a great job, brilliant kids [referring to the children she teaches], lovely flat, I’ve got her to look at [pointing at her pretty roommate], I’ve got amazing friends. I love my freedom. I’m a very lucky lady, I know that.”
There are two themes presented in this scene. One theme is Poppy’s eternal good-will, her own happiness, undeterred by the suffering around her. Though she is touched by it, and even experiences sorrow at times, she is able to move through the moments of misery and back into her status quo of blessed satisfaction with life. Most of us only wish we could achieve Poppy’s sense of equilibrium. The second theme is Poppy’s profound need to help others achieve happiness, and her utter inability to help.
Both themes have a great deal to say about this idea of “happiness” in western culture, particularly as experienced by women, according to Ariel Gore, whose new book, Bluebird: women and the psychology of happiness, explores the question, “Can women be smart, empowered, and happy?” In the U.S., the pursuit of happiness has become enshrined as a political right. And in the 20th century, happiness has become big business-a business, as Gore discovered, dominated by men and symbolized by the father of happiness, Martin Seligman himself. Women writers and psychologists, by contrast, have responded negatively to the new happiness movement. Why? Gore wanted to know. Don’t women want to be happy?
As Gore set out on her search to explore the source of happiness for women, she discovered, to her chagrin, that the things she thought would make her happy were not, in fact, her happiest moments. What’s going on? she wondered. Shouldn’t her many accomplishments-editor, writer, mother-make her happier? When the research Gore did suggested that the “happiest women” were wives and homemakers, she wondered if that truly equated happiness and, more importantly, whether it was possible to make other choices, to go against the social grain, and still be happy?
“We are told what will make us happy as if we were all the same woman, as if we all share a single heart, as if we can’t all be right when we realize our disparate desires: another child, an intellectual life, more than contentment, a giant squid” (23).
Part of the problem, she noted, is that “women’s notions about personal happiness are all tangled up with our ideas about privilege, selfishness, and social responsibility” (27).
Why do so many women believe that they are responsible for helping others to find happiness, even if it means neglecting or erasing their own happiness?
Although Americans have enshrined the pursuit of happiness as a right that should be protected by the constitution, they’ve done so for men only, suggests Gore. Society still emphasizes the feminine role as one of helping others pursue happiness. “There’s a hierarchy of happiness,” one woman told Gore. “First comes the kids, then my husband, and then me. I’m stronger than they are. I don’t need to be happy” (33.) Gore argues that women have historically become the cheerleaders because we’ve been dependent on men economically and one way of justifying that dependence was to do “extra emotional work” (41).
Gore suggests that many women are stuck at one level of emotional wholeness. If the first level is letting go of selfishness, of putting me first, the second level is acting only out of a sense of responsibility towards others. This is where most women get stuck, forgetting that they, too, have needs. There’s a third level of morality, one where we don’t slight others but we also take care of ourselves. “Connection and relationship involve more than one of us, after all,” Gore writes, “and if anyone is slighted-ourselves included-the relationship is harmed and something immoral has taken place” (29).
So the first step is recognizing that we can seek our own personal welfare without being selfish. If that’s the case, what does it mean to be happy? The key to happiness, Gore suggests, is the freedom to recognize what we want in life and to move towards those goals.
But what do we do when our desires can’t mesh with reality? For example, if our desire is to have a child, and we struggle with infertility? Or if we’ve invested our identities in a job or a marriage, and we experience unemployment or divorce? Is happiness incompatible with heartbreak, with sadness?
The answer, according to Gore, is “no.” Happiness is also the choice to respond productively and proactively to the negative stimuli in our lives, to “rejoice in the midst of suffering” (p. 14). Psychologists who study happiness have noted that only about 60% of our happiness is attributable to life circumstances and/or our basic personalities. Another 40% is “under our control and depends on ‘intentional activities’” (80). In other words, despite the circumstances we find ourselves in, we can practice happiness. This doesn’t mean faking it or putting on a cheerful face despite sadness. Rather, it means doing certain things that can move us away from discontent and heartbreak and towards happiness.
Gore researched the various suggestions for achieving happiness and put some of them to the test. Among the activities she tried, and which worked, were practicing gratitude; allowing herself to be get absorbed in the tasks at hand, that is, experiencing flow in her work; recognizing that the challenge of juggling her work and her relationships (with her children, her partner, and others) was part of the joy in her life-that work didn’t have to get in the way of relationships and vice versa, but that they worked together in tandem; working with a life coach to better define her wants and desires in life, and then setting goals to help achieve them; and, finally, recognizing that she can find happiness in even the most menial of tasks when she doesn’t feel trapped by them, that is, doesn’t feel obligated or controlled by them.
“In nature, with our friends or children, working or reading, we are happy when we are dynamically engaged with our lives. We are happy when we’re following threads of thought and activity we’re curious about-unconcerned where those threads will lead….I am consistently happy when I experience a particular synthesis of the intellectual and the domestic. I like geeky academic texts and I like berry pie” (171-172).
Women find happiness, Gore says, when they reject the prescriptions for happiness that have been written for them-by church, society, spouses and partners-and have the courage to find their own path (173-174). In short, she’s arguing that women feel happiest when they have choices.
But making some choices limits other choices. And what do we do if we lack choices-if our choices are limited by circumstances we can’t change? There’s no easy answer to that one.
As I read Bluebird, I thought about my mother and the career sacrifices she made to put her family first-sacrifices she’s still making today, by taking care of her 100-year-old mother-in-law. Growing up, despite the sure knowledge that my mother loved me unconditionally and would always do what was in my best interests, I sensed that she yearned for some imagined future that she’d given up in order to put her husband and children first. It wasn’t that I believed my mother to be unhappy. It’s just that she didn’t seem exactly happy, either.
If I were to press Mom on whether she wished she had “achieved” more, I suspect she would say she’s achieved the most important thing-raising children who are functioning members of society. I once told her that the book she’s been writing for the past 25 years is her “grand opus.” She hesitated, then said, “Actually, I consider you and your brothers my ‘grand opus.’”
But even though my mother is pleased with her grown-up children, is glad she’s married to my dad, and loves her grandchildren, is she happy? Did she sacrifice joy in order to do what she was “supposed” to do? Even if she doesn’t regret the decisions she made, does she still secretly long for that other Future That Might Have Been?
I don’t know. You’d have to ask her. But what about me? Am I happy?
Although the American pursuit of happiness is legendary, my religious family didn’t consider personal happiness to be the main goal in life-or even a goal at all. It may be closer to the truth to say that personal happiness, or the pursuit of it, was rendered completely irrelevant to the grand pursuit of the truths of God and discovering his will for our lives.
My parents never stated it directly, but I picked up on and adopted the underlying belief that happiness was all well and good, but it was also a little selfish. The point of life wasn’t happiness. The point of life was salvation-finding God and then helping others find God. The point of life was doing what God called you to do. That was where true joy resided. If you resisted his calling, you’d be miserable. Presumably, if God had called me to do something, it would also be my heart’s desire. But if my heart’s desire was not what God intended for me, there would always be a tension between what I wanted to do and what God wanted me to do-and I’d never be happy until I gave in and was obedient. Happiness was obedience to God’s will, in other words.
I left religion behind when I left home, but I realized when I read this book that I haven’t left most of those ideas behind. There’s a secular version of this same belief. Happiness is a luxury, goes this version. Rather than pursuing personal happiness, we should be pursuing social justice, the elimination of hunger and poverty, the eradication of racism, sexism, homophobia, and all those other bad “isms.” Happiness has no place in this vision of the world. That’s not to say happiness is wrong-only that it has no purpose. Happiness, according to this view, doesn’t help you change the injustice in the world. Instead, passion and righteous anger are the tools you need.
Is it possible to pursue peace and justice-and be happy? It certainly should be! Part of the problem, I realize, is that there is something wrong with my definition of happiness.
I’ve fallen into the American trap of believing that the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of material and financial success. But I know myself well enough that I wouldn’t be happy if I was constantly in pursuit of the purse. Worse than being pointless, the pursuit of “wealth as happiness” contributes to the economic injustices in the world.
To be honest, the inner me still feels guilty at the thought of pursuing happiness at all. I still sort of believe that personal happiness is a lucky byproduct of these other things-pursuing your calling, helping others, making the world a more just and humane place. If you only pursue happiness, this inner me says, you risk never achieving it. Instead, pursue your calling, peace and justice, and loving relationships-then you’ll find your happiness. And if you don’t, this inner me insists, maybe it’s not your fault. And maybe it’s okay.
Perhaps Gore would agree with me. Happiness, she argues, isn’t a static condition. It isn’t a state we find ourselves in-it’s something we experience as we reach towards those things we really want in life (172-174). It’s almost like we experience it without knowing it. We only notice unhappiness.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be questioning whether my mother was or is happy-or whether I should or should not pursue happiness. That there are circumstances we can’t control-it isn’t easy for my mother to take care of my grandmother, for example, and I sure as hell would like to be a more famous and better paid writer-doesn’t change the basic fact that we are both living lives of our own choosing, reaching towards our highest values and our largest dreams.
In the end, we can’t ask much else of ourselves.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
qtd. in Gore, p. 181
I just returned from three great days in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, where I led a writing workshop at Beau Chene High; led a publishing workshop at Casa Azul Gifts;’ had a great reading at St. Charles Borromeo Church (the chapel, where black Catholics worshipped during the days of segregation, and which is still a thriving black Catholic congregation); and made books out of brown paper bags with kids during the Brown Bag Club in the Town Market Rural Arts Centre in Arnaudville.
On Saturday morning, Kathy McInnis, the lady who designs the book covers for Catalyst Book Press, took me to a zydeco breakfast at Cafe Des Amis. Wow, was that fun. Here are a couple of pix from the event, none taken while I was dancing (probably a good thing)…
I’m not really Zydeco-ed out. I think I could go do that every single Saturday morning. There’s nothing like that here in Livermore, California….and we’re the poorer for it…I’m not sure it’s possible to hear a great zydeco band without your feet kicking up a storm. On Saturday night, one of the attendees at the poetry reading told me that one of the great things about zydeco breakfasts is seeing the upper-class and upper-middle-class white ladies dancing with young black cowboys. “They check their politics at the door,” he said. He was right. I definitely saw that in action.
I also went to mass on Sunday at Charles Borromeo, saddened to hear the history of segregation that still plagues the congregation. I tried my best to hear the sermon but couldn’t understand a word the priest was saying. It wasn’t the southern accent…and I don’t think it was my hearing (though Chris accuses me of being hard of hearing all the time)…I think that priest just mumbles a lot.
I ate a ton of fried food in 3 days and probably came back two pounds heavier than I left.
Last night as I waited for my husband to come home from teaching a night class, somebody rattled my doorknob and rang the doorbell. The puppies galloped to the door, woofing and panting and barking, sounding a lot bigger than they really are. I thought maybe it was Chris at the door. He likes to get the dogs hyped up when he comes home by doing things like that. Still, it was dark so I checked through the window before opening the door and didn’t see anybody standing there. Nervous, I went around shutting all the windows in the house. Just in case.
I grew up afraid. I remember being scared to look in the mirror when I was alone in a room. I was afraid that I’d see a big, beefy-red face, a grinning lunatic, his hands closing around my throat as he throttled the breath out of me. I remember looking up, realizing I was alone in a room, and panicking, running screaming through the house. “Mom! Mom!”
Apparently, I wasn’t always a paragon of fear. My mother says that I changed from a happy-go-lucky little girl to a scaredy-cat about the time I turned four years old. The change was so dramatic, she thought maybe some of the teen boys on the block had molested me.
The fears changed as I grew older. When I was nine, I read one of those Chick Tracts about a guy who was possessed by demons.
God, that tract scared the bejesus outta me!
That night, I couldn’t sleep, shivering in the top bunk of my bed in my room where I was alone, very very very very alone and very very very very very afraid.
And…..I couldn’t sleep for months. Somehow, the idea that Satan could possess me—could be that intimately connected with me, could enter my body and spirit, could make me do things I didn’t want to do, could put me in danger, could (worst of all) make me desire to go to hell and then actually end up there!!!—took hold of my imagination at the deepest possible level and turned my life into a living hell for well over a year.
And this began my life-long intimate introduction to fear. Stomach-clenching, sweat-inducing, pure raw unadulterated fear, the kind you would feel if you were a young woman, alone in an alley in the middle of the night, facing three knife-wielding men who plan to have their way with you.
The terror would begin after lunch. Because after lunch, the day was a downhill march towards nightfall. To bedtime. To the time when I had to go to my room, alone, and face the horde of demons who occupied my stuffed animals, the dolls who sat innocently at the table in my dollhouse, the books on my shelves.
This was no monster in the closet. Unlike the monster in the closet, who disappeared when the light turned on, this was real. Demons were there, you just couldn’t see them. The Bible said so. And all the reassurances in the world that God would keep me safe, that the blood of Jesus would protect me from this Evil that stalked me and watched me and drooled over me, night and day, just waiting for the chance to devour me alive, didn’t make me feel safe. Not one teensy, tiny little bit. The only thing that made me feel safe was the presence of another person. Somehow Satan seemed less real if somebody else was in the room.
But my brothers didn’t want to sleep in my room every night and they didn’t want me to sleep in their room every night. And my parents didn’t want me to sleep in their room either. (As a kid, I didn’t get that. As a married adult, I kinda do.)
And to be fair, I don’t think I shared the magnitude of the terror that gripped me with any of them. I was too frightened to utter the words out loud: “Satan spends every night in my bedroom, waiting for his chance to possess me.”
So I didn’t have people around to save me. Between me and the hordes of hell, I had a paper-thin prayer that I said over and over and over, trying to keep myself safe. The mantra went like this: Dear-Jesus-let-every-single-thing-in-this-room-worship-you-and-only-you-keep-Satan-away-from-me-protect-me-Jesus-protect-me-Jesus-protectmeprotectmeprotectmepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasekeepmesafe…
The prayer was a lifeline between the time I had to turn out my light (9 p.m.) and the time my parents turned out their light (around 11 p.m.). That lifeline kept me afloat until their light went out. And then you know what saved me? Books. Books saved me.
I would creep out of bed and get a book, a safe book, a children’s book, one that wouldn’t contain demons or violence or anything unsafe. I would huddle in the very back of my closet, bathed in the harsh light of the light bulb. Or, better yet (because it made me feel less sequestered from the people I needed to be near me in order to feel safe), I would gently ease open my bedroom door and sit on the cold cement floor of the entryway just outside my bedroom.
I would read and read and read and read and read andreadandreadandreadandread (that reading was like praying, better than praying actually because it put me in a safe world with people, real people, and I wasn’t alone anymore). I would read and read until I was so exhausted (1 or 2 or 3 a.m.)—really, until I had inhabited another world long enough that I knew I could keep Satan at bay—that I could crawl back into bed and go to sleep.
And I would wake up at 6 a.m., to my father tickling my toes, and the cycle would begin all over again. Safe, only in the morning hours.
I will never know this for sure, but I am certain my fierce need to be a writer began sometime in the dim, dark hours of those many nights when I faced my fears by submerging myself in the worlds of children’s literature.
I love books because books saved me, literally.
I have said in the past that writing is prayer to me, for a lot of reasons which I won’t go into here. But it’s true that reading is a sort of prayer for me as well. This may be hard for people to understand, but not, perhaps, if they hear my story.
Books are what saved me. Music saved my husband from the fears he battled with as a teenager—specifically, the music of Bob Marley. I’m curious what your fears were and what saved you.
From Midwest Book Review: “Maternity is more than putting on a little weight and having a baby show up nine months later. “Labor Pains and Birth Stories” is a collection of anecdotes covering the adventure and misadventure that is oncoming motherhood – as well as oncoming fatherhood. Maternity is a nine month span of joy and worry; joy because of the arrival of a new soul to the world, and worry that every little thing you do during this time could screw them up for life. “Labor Pains and Birth Stories” is a fine choice for future mothers, and should not be ignored by future fathers either. ”
From Ralph Magazine: Kind of an odd review, and thoroughly disagree that the best writing is at the front of the book, but here’s one quote: “We are reminded in a couple of these stories that — in a single twenty-four hour period — there are 300,000 children being born into the world. If there are two words to describe the truth of becoming a mother, one is pain; the other is waiting.”
Check out Bookslut’s provocative discussion of childbirth after reading Labor Pains and Birth Stories. A thoughtful review, not necessarily positive, and I’m certainly appreciative of the time and effort put into this one, though I disagree with the assumption that I had a political agenda and was pushing midwifery/home birth/ natural births and am opposed to cesarean sections, since well ovver half of the contributors (almost 2/3) had hospital births. But it’s true, I didn’t include a cesarean section story–nobody contributed a cesarean section story, so I had none to offer.
And here’s one from MetroActive, one of the Bay Area’s many small newspapers. (Thank you, Tania, for securing this one!) “My hope is that our child’s birth will be simple and smooth. Labor Pains and Birth Stories assures me that this is a delusional fantasy. Labor Pains and Birth Stories reminds me about pelvic exams and pitocin and epidurals and slowed heart rates and complications and death and arrrggghhh. Elisabeth Aron turns in a tear-jerking story of a stillbirth; Ann Angel writes about her teenage daughter giving a child up for adoption; and Sebastopol author Tania Pryputniewicz shows that no matter how carefully one plans for a natural, simple birth, there’s always the possibility of the dreadfully unexpected. Can’t it just be easy? Please?”
The Feminist Review has given LABOR PAINS AND BIRTH STORIES a very positive review here.
Thank you, Feminist Review, and thank you to my wonderful writers for all their hard work and for making this such a great book.
Here’s a couple of short excerpts from the review:
“With twenty-nine compelling essays of pain and strength, each glimpse these writers provide validates the awesomeness and depth of the process of pregnancy. Written from mostly women authors, Powers weaves together a tapestry of debate, conflict, joy, and uncertainty all through the common practice of story-telling our lives….Not only are the individual literary essays gifts for those seeking comfort and company in their own birthing experience; the collection as a whole can be used for critical analysis as to how the world not only accepts children, but how we treat and care for mothers as well.”
