3.0
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood
ByPublisher 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 communities21 Reviews
3.0
Sue
Created 14 days agoShare
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mairead
Created 6 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."”
Ardhra Prakash
Created 7 months agoShare
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onlygoodthings
Created about 1 year agoShare
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“It’s taking a lot for me not to want to give this book 5 stars but to do so doesn’t feel wholly right. The writing in this book is so honest, perceptive and powerful. Enright’s passages on pregnancy made me feel understood and I’m sure the same will be said for parenting once that comes for me. Her stories are so authentic and her thoughts penned feel as if she’s meticulously captured a feeling you once had. Beautiful writing.
The only thing that let it down slightly for me was the pace and sometimes the repetitive nature of the subject matter. I found I had to read little bits at a time. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever underlined so much in a book or wanted to read so much of it aloud to whoever happened to be nearby. “She is just so right!”, I found myself thinking time and time again.”
Elizabeth Johnston
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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