3.0
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood
By Anne EnrightPublisher Description
A San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick
"Much of the book is astonishingly funny; the rest would break your heart." —Colm Tóibín
Now, in Making Babies, Enright offers a new kind of memoir: an unapologetic look at the very personal experience of becoming a mother. With a refreshing no-nonsense attitude, Enright opens up about the birth and first two years of her children’s lives. Enright was married for eighteen years before she and her husband Martin, a playwright, decided to have children. Already a confident, successful writer, Enright continued to work in her native Ireland after each of her two babies was born. While each baby slept, those first two years of life, Enright wrote, in dispatches, about the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of motherhood.
Here, unfiltered and irreverent, are Enright’s keen reactions to the pains of pregnancy, the joys of breast milk, and the all-too-common pressures to be the “perfect” parent. Supremely observant and endlessly quizzical, Enright is never saccharine, always witty, but also deeply loving.
Already a bestseller in the UK, Making Babies brings Enright’s autobiographical writing to American readers for the first time. Tender and candid, it captures beautifully just what it’s like for a working woman to become a mother. The result is a moving chronicle of parenthood from one of the most distinctive and gifted authors writing today.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities5 Reviews
3.0
mairead
Created 2 months agoShare
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“holy cow, did I love the essay on her daughter Being Two. Loveeeeed. Have to figure out how to document A's toddler years as well and delightfully.(Also, Nine Months and most of Babies: A Breeder's Guide.)
Favorites:
"Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world."
"‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know."
"There is nothing better, when you can’t get up, than lying in bed with a baby. If the baby gets bored, you can flutter your hand, high above its face, then swoop down to beep-beep its nose. If you are very tired, support the waving arm with your other arm, and close your eyes."
"And I want to tell them nothing about her. She is a child, she must not be described. She must be kept fluid and open; not labelled or marked. I could say that she is playful, open, stubborn, bossy, winsome, serious, giddy, boisterous, clinging, gorgeous —but these are words that describe every single two-year-old on the planet, they are not the essence of herself, the thing that will always be there. Describing a child is a matter of prediction or nostalgia. There is no present moment. You are always trying to grasp something that changes even as you look at it. Besides, all children are the same, somehow. And still I know she is different from the general run of toddlers."”
Rouxlala
Created over 4 years agoShare
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Tara Noonan
Created over 4 years agoShare
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Melissa G
Created over 7 years agoShare
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“It was too jumbled stream of consciousness for me. It also didn't seem to have a point.”
Sarah Slack
Created over 12 years agoShare
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“Enright gives her unvarnished account of having and raising two babies in just over two years. It's funny and frightening and feels very real. I liked it a lot of the individual essays, but the collection itself wasn't arranged in a terribly coherent way, so by the end I was having a little trouble staying interested in yet another essay that loosely fit with the topic babies and parenting.”
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