The Perils of Reading Pregnant

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May 20, 2011 | 10 books mentioned 27 5 min read

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When I was engaged to be married, I lost my mind.  I’m aware that sounds hyperbolic,  but that’s really how it felt: as if my mind had abandoned me,  slipped through my ears when I wasn’t looking, to be replaced with something that I didn’t recognize or trust.  I was so nervous all the time, my mind skipping from one terrible and scary thought to the next, that reading became almost impossible.  Do you know how many stories there are about bad marriages?

During this fraught time, I tried to read an Alice Munro story in the bath.  What story, I have no idea (clearly, I blocked it out), but it was about a woman who kills her husband.  I couldn’t finish it because I began to fear–to believe, actually–that I was in danger of killing my own future husband.  Oh, how my Intended laughed when I voiced these fears!  He wasn’t afraid of me and my murderous capabilities!  He eventually talked me down from my nonsense ledge, and got me laughing along with him.  But I was still too afraid to finish the story.

That was five years ago.  I’ve since retrieved my mind, gotten and stayed married, and returned to reading.   Thank goodness.  Sometimes, I imagine all the great and beautiful books I must have missed during my engagement, and the loss sends a shiver of regret through me.

Last fall, when I found out I was pregnant, I waited for the mind-losing anxiety to descend on me once more.  It didn’t.  (Or, I should say, it hasn’t yet.  I do have five more weeks to lose my mind for old time’s sake!)  Because I feel as normal as can be expected when you’re growing a human being inside of you, I’ve noticed that other people experience anxiety for me.  They don’t want me to carry anything, not even a carton of orange juice.  They want me to sit down already!  They want to give me more water, a glass of milk, a pint of ice cream.  And they don’t want  me to read just anything.  More than once I’ve had a person recommend a book to me, and then say, “Oh, but don’t read it now.  Not while you’re pregnant!”   Apparently, people’s protective urges extend beyond the body of the mother-to-be, and into her reading life.  If literature is clogged with unhappy marriages, it’s certainly also darkened with dead babies and the complex melancholy of mothers.

So, as either a warning to other mothers-to-be, or as great “Fuck you!” to all the people who keep telling me to keep things light as I carry my child to term, here’s a list of non-friendly pregnancy books.  Read at your own risk…

coverRosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin: I admit, I haven’t read the novel, but I love the movie, starring the bewitching Mia Farrow.  I have purposely kept my blonde hair very short these last 8 and a half months because I appreciate the cinematic allusion, though I have one friend in particular who urged me, early on, to grow out my locks.  “It’s not funny!” she said. “What kind of message are  you sending?”  How about this: Every pregnant woman wonders, at least once, if she’s got the devil’s spawn growing inside of her.

coverThe Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell: This is the next novel I’m going to read, despite my sister Heidi’s warnings that I should wait until after my baby’s born. O’Farrell’s novel, which my sister could not put down, and which made her sob at its ending, follows two stories–one about a woman in post-war London, and one about contemporary parents in that same city.  There’s apparently some childbirth trauma.  Lots of blood, my sister said.  She also told me to avoid Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks.  The deaths–deaths, plural--in this novel still haunt her.

coverAn Exact Replica of a Figure of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken: Every morning I awake to the spine of this powerful and painful memoir, which I chose as one of my favorite books of 2008.  It sits on the shelf by my bed, right next to Nox by Anne Carson and Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.  (That’s a lot of death to wake up to, I realize).   McCracken’s story of raising a child after the stillbirth of her first is all the more terrifying and moving because it’s true, and because she speaks of trauma and grief in a distinct, unflinching, and sometimes even funny way.  I keep wondering if this book might mean more to me on a second read, now that I am pregnant, now that I know firsthand what I could lose, what and whom I would mourn.  Such a book reminds me not to take this time in my life lightly; it reminds me that I’m already a mother.

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk: This novel is about one day (a la Mrs. Dalloway) in the posh lives of British mothers.   The unhappiness of its characters is so delicately and expertly rendered that it, at times, grows oppressive.  These are women who feel unconnected to their husbands, their kids, their lives. Such a book makes me fear the very phrase Sippy Cup.

coverWe Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: Shriver’s brilliant and dark novel is narrated by Eva, whose son Kevin is guilty of carrying out a Columbine-style high school killing.  It’s a grim but often very funny narrative of maternal ambivalence, and it’s certainly a mind-fuck for any mom-to-be.  Eva articulates every single dark thought a pregnant woman would be wise to avoid (For instance:  “What if my child grows up to be a murderer?” And, “What if I don’t love him?”).  Here’s a taste of the sharp prose, most likely to be left out of the highly-anticipated film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, due out this fall:

Meanwhile, I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distentions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.

The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness of my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species’ heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is so far my favorite book of the year.  I read it when I was about four months pregnant, and as I did so, I prayed I was having a girl (She might be anorexic, I thought, but she probably won’t be a serial killer.)  Turns out, I’m having a boy.  Ha!   Shriver’s novel is the most memorable book I’ve read in a while. And also, um, the most frightening.

What novels do you recommend a pregnant woman avoid?  Tempt me…

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

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Transfigurations of Self and Soul: Four Essential Essay Collections

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February 9, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 6 min read

In the age of memoir, essay collections are a tough sell. Like short story collections, books of essays seem destined to be sampled rather than appreciated start to finish. That is a shame. Good essay collections are performances: multiple acts of form and function, threaded together with theme. I have always loved the fiction of Andre Dubus, but it was not until I read Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Movable Chair that I began to understand the mind and heart behind the stories. This is not to say that essays serve an ancillary function, but rather that essays contain the inevitable need to require a point — either one orchestrated by the writer, or one imbued by the reader.

A masterful essay collection is a metered intellectual exercise. It is enjoyable to settle into the novelistic voice of memoir, but it is athletic to sprint, pause, breathe, and start again with the short-range essayist. Here are four essay collections worth reading: writers who challenge, surprise, and eventually reward their readers for staying the course.

1. White Girls by Hilton Als
Als is a literary showman, and White Girls is a masterful routine. The first act, “Tristes Tropiques,” is a nonfiction novella about the writer’s complicated longing for SL (Sir or Lady), whom Als considers his twin. The essay takes its name from a book by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose own interest in twins mirrors the romantic manner in which Als considers his own doubling. “I have always been one half of a whole,” Als writes, for “my ghostly twin, my nearly perfect other half” was his stillborn older brother. At roughly 80 pages, “Tristes Tropiques” is massive, a seemingly illogical choice to begin a collection, but White Girls is no average performance. “This Lonesome Place,” Als’s take on Flannery O’Connor, is best captured in its final sentence: “Her work has moved away from the South as she defined and knew it, all the way to Hollywood, where Americans have embraced it, hearing in O’Connor’s voice her uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” Als writes with equal verve about Truman Capote, Eminem, Richard Pryor, Malcolm X, André Leon Talley, and James Baldwin, yet my favorite is his treatment of Michael Jackson. I first read “Michael” in The New York Review of Books, where even its four-part structure felt inevitable. The essay begins in 1972, when “the female elders tell us what to look out for:” the men who exit the neon-lit Starlite Lounge in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Als hears Jackson’s first solo hit, “Ben,” escape from the bar before the door closes. How fascinating that a film-soundtrack song about a rat was a “mournful ballad,” which was embraced “among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing.” “Ben” was Jackson personified, “all child — an Ariel of the ghetto, whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.” The ability to capture a soul in a single sentence is no small gift.

2. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Als mentions Baldwin’s essay about Jackson, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” in which Baldwin writes that “freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated — in the main, abominably — because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” To sing the praises of Baldwin as an essayist is nothing new, but The Fire Next Time needs to be read and studied more often. It is a pair of epistles; the first, “My Dungeon Shook,” is a letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the emancipation. Eternally a writer formed by hymn and sermon, his conclusion rises: “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.” “Down at the Cross,” the longer, second essay, sears the page. This was 1962, this is now: “It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else — housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers — would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.” Baldwin hits so many notes here, yet I always return to his strained relationship with God and his house. “On the blindest, most visceral level,” Baldwin never was able to “disengage myself from [the] excitement” of church: “There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord.” That Baldwin follows these memories with a critique of the structure and soul of that church is the rhetorical power of The Fire Next Time: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

3. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults by Joyelle McSweeney
Poet and playwright McSweeney carries her rhythms to prose, and the results are essays that remake the boundaries of criticism and personal narrative. The concept of the “necropastoral” describes the “manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral.” The occult angle suggests the blurring of the real and surreal, orchestrated by the strangeness inherent in most literature. Here she writes of Wilfred Owen (“The poems form a continuous, necrotizing battlefield, a skinlike surface, pitted and dubious, capable of inscription and unexpected transmission, full of holes and wounds through which pity can escape like a stench”); of Jack Smith’s continual, obsessive editing of his pastoral film, Normal Love; and her fellow Catholic artist Andy Warhol, who, “possessed by media, becomes another medium in a fluxing, necrotic, necromantic, anachronistic field of media” and others. Finally, McSweeney — a poet-essayist elsewhere interested in transformation, as in “how Catholic saint’s lore is really a kind of media theory, an idea about how certain kinds of power moves from place to place” — examines translation as perhaps the apex of art. Translation “works on extant materials and transforms them — conforms them — into new, sculptural, legible shapes.” Translation might be the most human of arts: it requires humility, transformation, resurrection in new language. In that vein, the art of the essay is an exercise in translation.

4. Sublime Physick by Patrick Madden
It is tempting to call Madden’s approach encyclopedic, but that suggests horizontal over vertical inquiry. Madden’s range is certainly wide, but he also manages to dig, and the end result of his essays here (and in his first collection, Quotidiana), is not merely collection but accumulation. “Spit,” the first essay in the book, is a representative sample. Madden begins with learning how to spit while “walking down a thin path through the thick Maine woods” sometime in the ’70s. Next he considers the antiseptic properties of the action, and how his daughter spit on him by mistake as they were about to enter church. He remembers his friend teaching him how to “gleek,” which happens to be the name of the space-monkey from The Wonder Twins cartoon, a monkey that chattered rather than spoke clearly. That idea of marble-mouthing makes him think of how his father, a member of the Notre Dame Glee Club, would sing to him and his siblings, and how Madden would become obsessed with the misunderstanding of lyrics. That leads him to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” — “Catch the spirit, catch the spit” — and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, who “was the envy of every boy he met because the gap in his upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and admirable way.” He continues to Isaiah 50:6, Mark 8:22, when a fan spit in the face of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, and, finally burrows down to personal stories, concluding with one of shame. This is what essays were made for, in the words of Madden’s introduction-style chapter: essays are “oxymoronic characters, rooted in the natural world, derived from real experience…always reaching toward ideas, trying to transcend mere description or depiction. Thus, essays, perform a kind of sublimation of the solid; from the concrete, they attain abstraction.” Essays as transfigurations of self and soul.

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| 10 books mentioned 6 min read
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Lists

Five Novels I Won’t Write

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October 18, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 12 6 min read

In her essay “The Getaway Car,” now included in her nonfiction collection This is a Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett describes well-meaning readers who approach her at events with ideas for books. To them, it’s a simple equation: their premise plus Patchett’s prose equals literary gold. Patchett deftly points out that ideas for stories are everywhere and easy to find; it’s the sitting down and writing them that takes hard work.

Now that I’m finished with my forthcoming novel, I see what she means. Without a long-term project to obsess over, I find myself channeling ideas all the time. A new premise will possess me for a few minutes or hours, my brain asking What if? or Why would that happen?, until, like a fly at a picnic, I alight on another, juicier narrative. Patchett is right: there are so many stories! Alas, I have only one life, and one voice, and only three days of childcare a week to write.

But maybe the ideas that don’t snag my prolonged attention would occupy another, different writer. Let’s try it: Here are a few novels I won’t write. Maybe you will.

The Doctor Is In

When I was pregnant with my daughter I read Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History and the Wonder of Childbirth by Mark Sloan. There are so many remarkable details in this book, from the cool, weird things a fetus does in the womb, to theories about why labor is so easy for gorillas and so difficult for human beings. I was especially compelled by the story of James Barry, the first surgeon to perform a successful cesarean (meaning that both mother and child survived). Barry, born in the late 1700s, was an Irish military surgeon in the British Army, and Sloan describes him as not being particularly likeable: pushy, without tact. After his death, it was revealed that Barry was born a woman but passed as a man for decades. When I read that I couldn’t believe his story hadn’t yet been told (or not adequately; whoever does this book right will have a bestseller followed by an HBO adaptation). Because I am not up for the task of writing historical fiction, I nominate my friend Anna Solomon for the job. She would be perfect: her two novels, The Little Bride and Leaving Lucy Pear, explore gender, sexuality, and motherhood in bygone eras; plus, she’s the co-editor of an anthology of birth stories called Labor Day (one of mine is in there).

 

Trouble in Oakland

This summer, the East Bay was rocked by a police scandal that included officers in Oakland and Richmond, as well as deputies in the Alameda county sheriff’s department. As of mid-September, criminal charges have been made against seven officers and Oakland has witnessed one Police Chief after another step down, with Mayor Libby Schaaf struggling to explain the multiple resignations. In June, a sex worker going by the name of Celeste Guap revealed in an on-air television interview that she’d had sex with a handful of police officers, some of them when she was a minor. As the East Bay Express reported:
According to text messages between police officers and the victim, at least three OPD officers leaked her confidential information about undercover prostitution stings. One Oakland cop obtained police reports and criminal histories and shared them with the victim, which is against department policy. Guap also said she slept with cops as a form of protection.
In a quote from Guap that I keep coming back to, she said that she and one of the officers would hook up “like every Saturday night for three months straight…He had a mattress in his back seat and slept in his car in the OPD parking lot, so we would hook up after work.”

This scandal exists against a much larger backdrop; it coincided with the release of Stanford University’s 2013-2014 research study of the Oakland police department, which found “a significant pattern of racial disparities” regarding who is stopped, handcuffed, and arrested; according to the report, police officers showed implicit bias against the African-American community. For many in the city, this came as no surprise. Mayor Schaaf  made relations with the community even more tense when she identified the race of officers involved in a totally different department scandal; according to the Oakland Black Officers Association, Schaaf had never before identified the race of officers involved in an investigation.

Fiction has always helped us understand and grapple with the complexities of the real world, and a book like this, in an era of highly visible police violence, feels necessary.

Who is this young woman? Who is this young cop? This would be a big, multi-voiced novel, with community members, law enforcement, and savvy political players. I nominate Attica Locke, author of three crime novels that deal with race in American life, including The Cutting Season, about the discovery of a dead body on a plantation-turned-tourist attraction-and-event space. (Though Ms. Locke might be a little busy right now — she’s currently writing for, and producing, the TV show Empire…)

 

Housework

In early September, Rachel Cusk published an essay called “Making House: Notes on Domesticity” in the New York Times Magazine that so closely aligned with my interests I was practically levitating with excitement as I read it. First, I love Cusk’s writing, in particular her essays about mothering in A Life’s Work. Second, I read design blogs daily and enjoy browsing furniture catalogues and real estate websites; if I’m anxious, nothing calms me more than thinking about sectionals in imaginary living rooms. Third, I am interested in the ways women’s identities are shaped and influenced, and this line from Cusk felt truer than anything I’d read in a long time:
Yet there are other imperatives that bedevil the contemporary heirs of traditional female identity, for whom insouciance in the face of the domestic can seem a sort of political requirement, as though by ceasing to care about our homes we could prove our lack of triviality, our busyness, our equality.
Well, that explains my shame at admitting my couch-fantasies here — shouldn’t I be above all that? Cusk’s essay led me to think about depictions of household maintenance and design in fiction. I’m usually a plot-lusty reader, but one of my favorite sections in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman was when its hero…cleaned his apartment. I still remember how gracefully it transported me to the more mundane aspects of life. I recently loved The Stager by Susan Coll, which is in part about a woman who prepares properties for the housing market by changing their furniture, painting a few walls, and so on. I could’ve read about her work for hundreds of pages!  I wonder, could someone write a domestic drama which contained no drama, only its domestic details? Can a novel exist on descriptions of laundry alone, on musings about where to best mount a living room television? I’m thinking the main character wants a “clean” house, like so many of the women on House Hunters. This would be a short and intensely claustrophobic book — but also, somehow, sexy. I nominate Rachel Cusk to write this book. If she’s unavailable perhaps Nicholson Baker wants to take on the challenge.

 

Ice Age Coming

A few days before my senior year of college, I did mushrooms with my best friend. Aside from walking into a field of corn shrieking, we also sat in his car and listened to Kid A by Radiohead. When the song “Idioteque” came on, and Thom Yorke began to sing, “Ice Age coming, Ice Age coming…” I had an entire vision about a novel set during a new ice age, with people grappling with the elements, wearing furs, re-purposing ceiling fans as weapons, and turning bathing suits into flags. I thought this idea was so brilliant that I refused to tell my friend about it for fear that he’d steal it. (I hadn’t yet gotten the memo from Ann Patchett about ideas v. work.) Sometimes I think about this unwritten ice age novel, and how fun it would be to read. I was going to nominate a Jean M. Auel type to pen such a saga when I read about The Sunlight Pilgrims by the Scottish author Jenni Fagan. Set in 2020, it shows us a world much like our own, but cold, and getting colder. In her review of the novel, Marisa Silver highlights Fagan’s poetic prose: “Early on, we are told that in this worst of winters “icicles will grow to the size of narwhal tusks or the long bony finger of winter herself.”” I’m putting on mittens and reading this!  Thank you, Ms. Fagan.

 

Crystal Geyser by CG Roxane

Have you ever read the label on a plastic bottle of Crystal Geyser water? (Why would you? The graphic design is horrendous.) Well, I did recently, and was struck by the words I found there:
Crystal Geyser
Natural
Alpine Spring Water
by CG Roxane
Now, I realize I could turn on the magical Google Machine and find out that CG Roxane is a corporation or whatever. But what’s the fun in that? Instead I imagined this CG Roxane as a person. He’s got on a Stetson cowboy hat and a large-collared Oxford shirt. He’s obsessed with water. His mother calls him Charles Gomez, which is what the “CG” stands for. In my mind, this book would be a little like the movie There Will be Blood, or a fictional version of the Robert Caro biographies of LBJ. A story about power, politics, insanity. It could also be a satire — an absurdist, playful romp. If that’s the case, I nominate Mark Leyner to write it. In 2012 the New York Times Magazine described Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe as “an adrenalized, needle-to-the-red satire of (among many other things) the derangements of celebrity mass worship in a disjunctive culture-gone-wild.” That’s pretty much what I had in mind with this story. Imagine Charles Gomez Roxane. He wants to own all the water. All of it!

What novels won’t you write?

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| 10 books mentioned 12 6 min read
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27 comments:

  2. here’s one but it’s not necessarily one to avoid, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson. A heartwarming story of a pregnant woman’s diary to her unborn son. It’s a departure from the genre that Patterson usually writes.

    It is a VERY good book and not just about the story itself, but life too in how we’re juggling so many balls hoping not to let one drop.

    enjoy!

  3. I had the same experience last year when I was pregnant with my son. I defiantly read PURGE by Sofi Oksanen after several people told me I just couldn’t read it while pregnant. And I found it profoundly unsettling in a very unpleasant way, just as they’d feared. So I made quite a reading list after that of “books I’ll read when I’m no longer pregnant.”

    What everyone failed to mention to me was that if a book is too disturbing for a pregnant woman to read, it will almost certainly be too disturbing for the mother of a newborn (who has very little time for reading anyway). I read THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE shortly after my son’s birth, and O’Farrell’s decription of the frighenting, drug-addled days following a traumatic birth is spot on. It’s a tremendous book that, while devastatingly sad, never made me feel anxious about my new status as a mother. Much like ROOM (which I read when I was 39 weeks pregnant), It made me feel invigorated, determined to be as strong and resilient as the mothers in it. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll ever read WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN now. I just can’t bring myself to pick it up.

  4. I reread Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child periodically, and although I’ve never conceived, it never fails to terrify me.

  5. My baby is six weeks old, and while pregnant, I read the McCracken, the O’Farrell, and the Cusk you mention above. Ha! I also read the Shriver about six months before I got pregnant; that one stays with you, every time you get a bad blow to the ribs.

    I also read: War and Peace (the charming mustachioed princess dies in childbirth!); Half Baked (one baby dies, one is born at 24 weeks and struggles for life in the NICU); Every Last One (almost all her babies die!) and Jacob de Zoet (some pretty horrifying childbirth/child sacrifice material). Soon after giving birth I read Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, and right now I’m deeply in the midst of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, both of which are heavy lifting.

    I say pooh to Little Earthquakes and all the light fuzzy chicky mom lit. You’re already in deep. You may as well read your way through the worst of it.

  6. Fay Weldon’s She May Not Leave broke me. Eastern European nanny seduces away father in slinky, insidious way with an awful, awful, bleach-my-brain-please scene in last 20 pages.

  7. I read The Road when I was nine months pregnant. BIG mistake. I love Rachel Cusk–glad you mentioned her. Her “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” is one I would suggest for after the baby is born.

  8. I would stay from Joy William’s “The Changeling.” It’s a horrifying book, Pearl, a young mother drinking gin and tonic after gin and tonic, after her failed attempt at escape from a sinister island. And her baby, who turns out to be a mother’s greatest nightmare. A scary, scary child. It’s also a remarkable, wonderful book, and I’m really happy that the Fairy Tale Review Press put it back into print.

  9. Agree completely about WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. I read it in January, way behind the curve, and it blew my mind. Lionel Shriver is so brilliant I don’t care how disturbing the book is. (Although I can’t say I wish I’d been pregnant while reading it…)

  10. I remember being pregnant with my second son and my husband rented the movie Gallipoli (which PJ Harvey sings about in her beautiful, haunting new record about WW1) and I was TRAUMATIZED. But I was not a tough pregnant lady in general- I was super delicate emotionally. Oddly, I don’t remember books being a problem, but I also don’t remember many things. I remember reading Map Of The World (Jane Hamiltion?) when my sons were babies and it didn’t bother me -the dead child part–but it did bother me “politically”. That said, it was deeply engrossing.

  11. I love this post Edan! The other-people-worried-for-you during pregnancy is so true. But really, I could have gotten used to all those pints of ice cream…

    Soon after August was born I read Skippy Dies. I felt worse about the title than any other aspect of the book and it definitely drew some funny looks from people.

    5 weeks left for you and Patrick? How exciting, enjoy them (but only from a sitting down, legs up position with a pint of ice cream in your hand)!

  12. Totally second the Joy Williams comment. Same for State of Grace. She is so, so, so good, though.

  13. Thanks for all these great suggestions–there’s a lot to dig into here..

    Yep, Lauren, now I only have 4 more weeks..!

  15. Pingback: Dog-Eared Books, Paul Giamatti and Gary Shteyngart, Banned Words, and More Literary Links « Fiction

  17. I didn’t read it while pregnant, but I think if I attempted White Oleander while pregnant, there might be dire consequences!

  18. Oh thank you thank you thank you for this! I am due next week, and while I’ve stuck mostly to sci-fi and other lighter fiction throughout my pregnancy, I very much appreciate the spirit in which your article was written.

    In fact this might be my new mantra: “Because I feel as normal as can be expected when you’re growing a human being inside of you, I’ve noticed that other people experience anxiety for me.” So true! And SO much worse this close to my due date… no wonder all I’ve been doing is reading as the big day gets closer! Thank goodness for escapism.

  20. You may also want to stay away from Joanna Kavenna’s “The Birth of Love,” although it’s fantastic. The long description of the beginnings of labor might be a bit much for you.
    And don’t even go near the nonfiction. I read the title “Pushed” while I was pregnant and it got me all worked up–mostly with righteous indignation toward doctors. And, arguably, you need doctors while you’re pregnant, so that’s no time to be feeling crankypants toward them.

  21. I second Doris Lessing’s Fith Child – it should right up there in the list. Also, Chuck Palahniuk’s books must not be fun to read if you’re battling morning sickness…

  22. Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian

    It’s a good book, and I would recommend it to anyone who is NOT pregnant. The night before I went to the hospital to have an induced labor for my 13-day-late firstborn, I read this book. I knew it would be disturbing, and it was, yet I could not put it down.
    It was a very long, tough labor – overseen by my least favorite of the three nurse-midwives whom I had seen throughout the pregnancy. My delivery had a better outcome than the one described in the book, but I still haven’t been able to read it again, even 11 years later.

  23. Pingback: New Links on the Block | Rockabye Baby!

  24. What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen. Memoir of an unexpected and traumatic pregnancy with extreme medical complications, the contemplation of late-stage abortion, and the outcome of all this.

  25. I’m coming a bit late to this, but THE HOTTEST DISHES OF THE TARTAR CUISINE is one that you might consider avoiding. I heard a reading of it by the translator, in which the narrator tries several gruesome methods of inducing miscarriage in her simple-minded daughter. (I’d just found out I was pregnant and had to excuse myself to get the nausea under control.)

    Other than that though, I salute the act of the freedom to read whatever you want when you’re pregnant. It’s easy to be superstitious about this stuff (I’m susceptible!), but there’s no reason we shouldn’t have deep literary experiences even while being a bit delicate with our bodies. Thanks for this piece!

  26. I wasn’t pregnant when i read it, but The Obscene Bird of Night is the most horrific book i’ve ever read and i never want to read it again, but i’ll never forget it. Rosemary’s Baby is actually a novel i have at home but haven’t read yet! i’m almost 20 weeks :)

  27. Don’t read The Time travellers Wife. I read it in early pregnancy and there seemed to be endless miscarriages with lots of descriptions of blood

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Lists

Millions Meta-Data 2011

Lists
January 6, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 2 5 min read

Before we get too far into 2012, let’s take a look at what was keeping readers interested on The Millions in 2011. To start, we’ll divide the most popular posts on The Millions into two categories, beginning with the 20 most popular pieces published on the site in 2011:

1. Our star-studded Year in Reading, with 72 participants naming 214 books, was a big hit across the internet.

2. Our pair of Most Anticipated posts were popular among readers looking for something new to read. Our 2012 book preview is already up and has readers looking ahead to this year’s likely highlights.

3. The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels: Mark O’Connell articulated how big books can entrap us and hold us hostage. “It’s reading that has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it.”

4. The Year of Wonders: Alex Shakar’s harrowing tale of all-too-brief publishing success. “It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000 and the bidding on my first novel had reached six figures, then paused for people to track down more cash. I was 32. I’d never made over $12,000 in a year.”

5. Reasons Not to Self-Publish in 2011-2012: A List: Self-publishing was one of 2011’s big industry trends, but Edan Lepucki gave us eight reasons why she won’t be self-publishing… at least not any time soon.

6. Judging Books by Their Covers: U.S. Vs. U.K.: This unscientific look at book covers had readers taking sides in a trans-Atlantic design debate.

7. Mad, Mad World: Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: Ronson’s investigation was one of the hottest nonfiction books of the year. Janet Potter was a fan; she also took the test. Spoiler alert: she’s not a psychopath, but her cat might be.

8. Exclusive: The First Lines of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84: Murakami’s massive tome was one of the most anticipated of the year. We had the first lines a couple months in advance.

9. On Bad Reviews: It’s the question no author wants to contemplate. What do you do when you get a bad review? Emily St. John Mandel chronicles some authors behaving badly and admits, “it’s extraordinarily difficult to respond to a bad review with grace.”

10. 12 Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use: Hannah Gerson’s list of gifts for writers includes only one book and exactly zero blank journals.

11. Making Room for Readers: Steve Himmer’s thoughtful piece is a plea to make books accessible to all who are curious about reading. “It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach.”

12. Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?: Edan contemplates how (or even if!) to accept “the death of her first true darling.”

13. Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre?: We see the literary mash-ups everywhere now. Is genre writing becoming ever more tempting for literary types? Kim Wright tries to find out.

14. The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis: Cathy Day wonders whether proliferating MFA programs that fetishize short fiction are doing a disservice to aspiring novel writers everywhere.

15. What We Call What Women Write: Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer but an off-hand remark that followed had many accusing her of bashing “chick lit” and other female writers. Deena Drewis explained why all the invective was misdirected.

16. Saving Salinger: A pair of J.D. Salinger short stories have never been published in the nearly sixty years since Salinger wrote them. Princeton’s Firestone Library now protects the only known copies. Kristpher Jansma harbored thoughts of liberation as he embarked on a pilgrimage to read them.

17. A Critic’s Notebook: On Meeting Ayn Rand’s Editor at Antioch College: Gary Percesepe once met Ayn Rand’s editor, who memorably remarked that Rand wrote the best children’s literature in America.

18. Six Egyptian Writers You Don’t Know But You Should: With the world focusing on Tarhir Square in 2011, Pauls Toutonghi, an author of Egyptian descent, offered up a list of essential reading.

19. The E-Reader of Sand: The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover: Mark tackles the e-reader conundrum. “It occurred to me that Borges would have been thrilled and horrified in equal measure by the Kindle. In fact, in a weird way, he sort of invented it.”

20. On the Desire to Be Well-Read: A Review of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction: Timothy Aubry finds that Alan Jacobs’s book “is designed for me, for people who are as interested in ‘having read’ books as they are in reading books.”

There are also a number of older pieces that Millions readers return to again and again. This list of top “evergreens” comprises pieces that went up before 2011 but continued to interest readers over the last year.

1. The Best of the Millennium (So Far): Our late-2009 series invited a distinguished panel of writers and thinkers to nominate the best books of the decade. The ensuing list stoked controversy and interest that has lingered. The write-ups of the “winner” and runners-up have also remained popular. We also invited our readers to compile a “best of the decade” list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the readers’ list seemed to receive a warmer reception.

2. A Year in Reading 2010: 2010’s series stayed popular in 2011.

3. Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux: the Definitive Edition: Five years on, our “definitive” literary pronunciation guide is still a favorite The Millions. There must be a lot of people name-dropping Goethe out there. The initial, aborted attempt remains popular as well.

4. Confessions of a Book Pirate: Our interview with someone actually “pirating” ebooks put a face on a nebulous trend and generated huge interest among readers, the publishing industry, and the media.

5. Our 2010 preview stayed popular in 2011.

6. The Magisterial Goal: We’ve seen an abiding interest in James Kaelan’s paean to verbally inventive soccer announcer Ray Hudson.

7. The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons): Another sports favorite! Sports fans love this collection of links to some of the best sports writing of all time.

8. A Year in Marginalia: Sam Anderson: Readers love Anderson’s examples of his serious marginalia habit. Recently, he showed off more of the same at the New York Times.

9. Food Fight: Anthony Bourdain Slams Rachael Ray: This rare dalliance for The Millions into celebrity gossip suggests an enduring interest in the bad blood between these two food (and publishing) superstars.

10. Deckle Edge in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A musing on a quirky design element of modern books had us exploring the history of these objects and contemplating their future.

Where did all these readers come from? Google (and Facebook and Twitter and StumbleUpon and Reddit) sent quite a few of course, but many Millions readers came from other sites too. These were the top 10 sites to send us traffic in 2011:

1. The Browser
2. Huffington Post
3. The New Yorker
4. Kottke.org
5. The Daily Beast
6. The Morning News
7. The Complete Review
8. MetaFilter
9. HTMLgiant
10. The Awl

Lists
| 10 books mentioned 2 5 min read
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The Ultimate List: 25 Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use

Lists Notable Articles
December 2, 2013 | 10 books mentioned 15 9 min read

Two years ago I wrote a holiday gift guide for writers after I realized that I had a drawer full of blank journals that I had never used, all given to me by friends and family wanting to support my writing habit. I knew I couldn’t be the only writer with this particular surplus, so I decided to draw up a list of items that writers might actually use. I repeated the exercise in 2012, coming up with ten new suggestions. This year’s list is an updated version of those two lists, now all in one place with a few new items added to the end, for a grand total of 25 writer-friendly gifts.

1.  A Cheesy New Bestseller

One of the best presents I ever got was a hardcover copy of The Nanny Diaries from my roommate. I really wanted it, but there were over 300 people on the library’s waiting list and I wasn’t going to shell out $25 for something I was unlikely to read twice. The funny thing was that I never told my roommate that I wanted to read The Nanny Diaries. She just guessed that I had a secret craving for it. Of course, it can be as hard to gauge your friend’s taste in pop culture as it is in high culture, but it’s better to guess wrong in the pop culture arena, because your friend is more likely to exchange it for something she likes better. Whereas, if you give her Gravity’s Rainbow, she’ll keep it for years out of obligation.

2.  Good lipstick

Writers are often broke. If they have $30 to spare, they are going to spend it on dinner, booze, or new books. Not lipstick. But writers are pale from spending so much time inside and could use some color. Make-up can be a tricky gift because it suggests that you think your friend’s face could use improvement. That’s why it’s important to go to a department store make-up counter and buy something frivolous and indulgent, like a single tube of red lipstick or some face powder or blush in a nice-looking case.

3.  Foreign language learning software

Most writers wish they knew more languages. It can also be relaxing to be rendered inarticulate in a new language, in that it offers a real break from personal expression, nuance, and irony. At the same time, learning a new language sharpens your native tongue, and expands your vocabulary. It’s sort of like cross training.

4.  A Bathrobe

John Cheever famously donned a suit every morning in order to write. But as Ann Beattie revealed, and as a generation of bloggers already knows, most writers wear awful clothing while they are working. Help your writer friend out by giving her a beautiful robe to cover up her bizarre ensembles. Even if she already has one, she probably hasn’t’t washed it in a long time, and could use another.

5.  A Manicure

I bite my nails, especially when I’m writing. I’ve noticed that a lot of other writers have suspiciously short nails, too. Manicures help. Also, manicures get writers out of the house and out for a walk.

6.  “Freedom”, the internet-blocking software

“Freedom” is a computer program that blocks the internet on your computer for up to eight hours. I don’t understand why it’s effective, since it’s relatively easy to circumvent, but as soon as I turn it on, I stay off the internet for hours at a time. (There is also a program called “Anti-social”, which only blocks the social parts of the internet, like Facebook and Twitter.)

7.  Booze, coffee, and other stimulants

Find out what your friend likes to drink and buy a really nice version of that thing. If your friend is a coffee or tea drinker, find out how he brews it and buy him really good beans or tea leaves. Even better, find out what cafe he frequents and see if they sell gift certificates.

8.  Yoga Classes

Yoga does wonders for anxiety, depression, and aching backs, three afflictions common in writers. Most yoga classes also incorporate some kind of meditation practice, which is also very helpful.

9.  A pet

This is not a gift to be given casually and definitely not as a surprise, but if you live with a writer and you’ve been on the fence on whether or not to get a furry companion, consider this advice on how to be more prolific, from Muriel Spark: “If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat… The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.” Another prolific writer, Jennifer Weiner, recommends dogs on her website, where she’s posted a list of tips for aspiring writers. Dogs, she explains, foster discipline, because they must be walked several times a day. Furthermore, Weiner notes, walking is as beneficial for the writer as it is for the dog: “While you’re walking, you’re thinking about plot, or characters, or that tricky bit of dialogue that’s had you stumped for days.”

10.  Freezable homemade foods: casseroles, soups, breads, and baked goods.

This is a potentially Mom-ish gift, but if your friend is on deadline, a new parent, or just far from home during the holidays, a home-cooked meal could be a lovely gesture. I emphasize freezable because it should be something that you make at home and leave with your friend to eat later. If you can’t cook, buy a pie.

11.  A hand-written letter

When I first recommended this gift, two years ago, I pointed out that a lot of writers still get rejection letters through the U.S. mail, so it would be a nice change of pace to receive a note from a friend. But over the past couple years, I’ve noticed that magazines are sending most of their rejections via email. However, that simply means that a handwritten card would be an even more astonishing and special occurrence.

12.  The Gift, by Lewis Hyde

The Gift examines the role of artists in market economies and is the perfect antidote to all the earnest, helpful guides that aim to teach writers how to be more publishable, saleable, and disciplined. Where most writing guides make writers feel they could succeed if only they were more productive and efficient, The Gift argues that productivity and efficiency are market-based terms that have little meaning in gift economies, which is where many creative writers exchange and share their work. Another way of putting it is to say that The Gift makes writers feel less crazy.

13.  A Bookshelf Portrait

If every bookshelf is a portrait of its owner, then why not commission an actual portrait of a bookshelf? That’s what Your Ideal Bookshelf allows booklovers to do, offering hand-painted portraits of “the books that changed your life, that defined who you are, that you read again and again.” If that seems like too much pressure, you can purchase prints of other people’s ideal bookshelves, as well as drawings of ideal bookshelves organized by genre, subject, and author. Harry Potter fanatics can find portraits of the entire series, while home cooks can choose from several different shelves of culinary classics. The creators of Your Ideal Bookshelf have also produced a book, My Ideal Bookshelf, which showcases the favorite bookshelves of a variety of writers and artists, including Patti Smith, Junot Diaz, Miranda July, and Judd Apatow.

14.  Bookends

Bookends are underrated. Not only do they keep books from falling off the shelf, they allow you to make a bookshelf anywhere — on a desk, in a windowsill, or atop a bedside table. Even ugly bookends end up being used, so go ahead and spring for ones in the shape of golden pigs or poodles.

15.  Clothing With a Literary Print

Last year, I highlighted the prints of fashion designer Mary Katranzou’s fall 2012 collection, which included a dress whose bodice was dominated by a red Olivetti typewriter. This year, I was hoping to recommend Tommy Hilfiger’s library shirt dress, but unfortunately, it is already sold out. (Maybe you can find it on ebay.) For a more reliable purveyor of book-inspired clothing, check out Out of Print, an online shop that sells tee shirts and other items that feature “iconic and often out of print book covers.”

16.  An Elaborately Beautiful Book

2012 brought Chris Ware’s graphic novel, Building Stories, a book that was included on several “Year In Reading” lists, and which got me thinking about other beautifully designed books: Anne Carson’s poem Nox; Lauren Redniss’s biography of Marie and Pierre Curie, Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout; and Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel-in-index-cards, The Original of Laura. To this list I would like to add two 2013 titles: David Rakoff’s novel-in-verse: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish and Samantha Hahn’s book of illustrations of fictional heroines, Well-Read Women.

17.  A subscription to Journal of the Month

Literary journals! There are so many of them, and so many of them are good, and almost all of them would like you to read a copy before you submit your stories to them. Journal of the Month helps writers sample a wide variety of journals by sending subscribers a different journal each month. Each month’s selection is a surprise, and you can buy subscriptions of 3, 6, or 12 months. You can also choose to receive magazines on a quarterly basis.

18.  Draw It With Your Eyes Closed

This unusual, practical, gossipy, eclectic, and highly entertaining anthology is a collection of assignments for fine arts students. But it’s unexpectedly useful for writers, too — or, at least, it was useful to me, helping me to think about the writing process in new ways. I bought if for my brother-in-law, who teaches drawing, but found myself unable to put it down after reading a couple of entries. With contributions from art teachers, art students, artists, and art professionals, Draw It With Your Eyes Closed delves into the creative process of artists by focusing on their art school training. If there’s an equivalent to this book from the world of creative writing MFAs, I’d love to read it, but I doubt it’d be as raucous or mischievous.

19.  The Dictionary of American Regional English

When I was growing up, my parents had a slang dictionary, which I dorkily consulted in order to learn the meanings of certain colorful insults. But I quickly found the dictionary to be more interesting when I browsed beyond the curse words. The Dictionary of American Regional English is kind of like the slang dictionary except that it is six volumes, and based on fifty years of research. The final volume was completed last year, an event that one of its founding researchers did not live to see. Long a resource for editors and lawyers, it’s the kind of book that any word nerd could appreciate.

20.  A Quill Pen

Okay, this is a ridiculous gift idea, I admit it. But with the current enthusiasm for typewriters going strong, can quill pens be far behind? There are hundreds on Etsy, from turkey feather models to Harry Potter-inspired models.

21.  A Fireplace

According to poet Adam Kirsch, “Every writer needs a fireplace”:
On publication day, an author should burn a copy of his book, to acknowledge that what he accomplished is negligible compared to what he imagined and intended. Only this kind of burnt offering might be acceptable to the Muse he has let down.
The ultimate in old-school technology, a fireplace (or perhaps, a fire table?) allows writers to dispose of unsatisfying drafts in a dramatic fashion. Sometimes the trashcan icon at the bottom of your computer screen just doesn’t feel definitive enough.

22.  A Place to Write

Virgina Woolf said it best when she wrote that a woman “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Poet Brenda Shaughnessy put a somewhat finer point on it in Poets & Writers, when she speculated that the happiness of her marriage to fellow poet Craig Morgan Teicher depended on a shared rented writing studio:
This might be the true secret of the sane poet-couple: Rent writing space. Make it as private as possible. This single thing has completely changed our lives.
How do you give someone a place to write? It could mean finding someone a cubicle in your office, renting a studio, lending a summer cottage or winter cabin, helping someone to finance a residency, or simply rearranging a shared space to make room for a bookshelf, a comfy chair, or a desk.

23.  Childcare

If you are the spouse of a writer and the two of you have a small or even medium-sized child (or children) here is a foolproof gift idea: Take yourself and the kiddos away for a long weekend. Go to the grandparents, the zoo, the casino, wherever. Leave early Friday morning; do not come back until late Sunday night.

24.  A Donation to a Literary Charity

A gift to the literary community is a gift to your writer-friend. Almost all literary magazines, libraries, and writer’s residencies are non-profit organizations. You can also help build and create new literary communities by donating to a charity that promotes literacy. Here is a partial list of groups whose work brings books, literature, and writing resources to those who might not otherwise have access (please feel free to leave additional suggestions in the comments): First Book provides new books to kids; Reading Is Fundamental delivers books and reading resources directly to the homes of families in need; 826 National is a network of free writing centers (pioneered by author Dave Eggers); Literacy Partners is a New York City-based non-profit that helps adults learn to read; and finally, Books Through Bars, another non-profit based in New York City, provides books to prisoners.

25.  A Blank Journal

I realize I am contradicting myself with this last recommendation, but earlier this fall, when I was interviewing Dani Shapiro for The Millions, she mentioned that she often starts new projects in a fresh notebook, saying “there’s such freedom in a notebook.” Her comment made me think of my drawer full of blank journals, those gifts I never used but for some reason cannot not give away. I always thought I kept them out of guilt but maybe the truth is that I keep them because they are hopeful reminders of the freedom that writing can provide—that sense of openness and possibility that comes not only at the beginning of projects but sometimes in the midst of composing a sentence. So, go ahead and give your writer friend a beautiful blank notebook. She may never write a word in it but will likely keep it as a symbol of the elusive beauty of the writing process.

Lists Notable Articles
| 10 books mentioned 15 9 min read
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