Astute, poetic reflections on the powerful mother-daughter
relationship from conception through the baby's first year.
Developmental researchers have found that when a mother and her
infant gaze into each other's eyes, the feelings generated can be
so intense that one or the other must turn away for relief. It is
about such feelings that novelist Erdrich (The Beet Queen, 1993,
etc.) writes in this intimate record of pregnancy and giving birth.
"Love of an infant," she says, "is of a different order" than love
of an adult: It is "all-absorbing, a blur of boundaries and
messages...uncomfortably close to self-erasure." But like mother
and infant, neither writer nor reader can confront those emotions
directly for very long. So Erdrich finds both relief and metaphoric
power in painting scenes from her life with her husband, five other
children, a dog, and many cats on a New Hampshire farm. She
describes dreaming over garden catalogs in the long New Hampshire
winter nights, trapping and taming feral cats, collecting birds'
nests, an "all-licorice" meal her husband prepared to satisfy her
inexplicable craving, and a blue jay's defiant dance to
successfully thwart a hawk's attack. Tied to each tale of rural
life is a range of emotions: rage, depression, frustration, pain,
sorrow, and nostalgia as well as transcendent joy, ordinary
pleasure, pride, and satisfaction. How "a writer's sympathies, like
forced blooms, enlarge in the hothouse of an infant's needs" is
also part of Erdrich's story, as she trudges back and forth each
day to her writing shack, accompanied by her nursing infant. For
instance, a writer's effort to understand and depict evil becomes
easier when the threat of evil coincides with a mother's absolute
need to protect her child. Occasionally too self-conscious about
the importance of Erdrich's role as Writer, but the bond between
mother and infant has rarely been captured so well. (Kirkus
Reviews)
An exhilarating and enchanting meditation on becoming a mother from
one of America's most acclaimed writers, and winner of the National
Book Award for Fiction, 2012. 'She is a winter-spring baby, and all
day there is just her, me, snow and the birds outside.' A mother
for all seasons, Erdrich tracks the end of her pregnancy into the
dazzling light of childbirth and beyond into her baby's infancy,
keeping a weather-eye on Nature outside her window and inside her
body, gauging its lessons and constraints. She spills over with the
intense feeling a baby carries into being as its gift to its
mother. But her book is no mystical trip; Erdrich is umbilically
attached to the earth, and to common sense. All prospective and
seasoned parents will cherish her report from the frontline, for
she never lectures, she simply strives to record exactly - in
language both supple and ripe. Moving and memorable, neither
handbook nor tract, here, for perhaps the first time, is mothering
converted into writing without fakery.
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