Synopsis
The critically acclaimed novelist poignantly reviews the large and small events--and the attendant joys, frustrations, compromises, insights, and emotional satisfactions--that informed her pregnancy, her first year as a new mother, and her return to writing. 35,000 first printing. $60,000 ad/promo. Tour.
Reviews
Erdrich, who has published poetry and critically acclaimed novels (Love Medicine, The Beet Queen), here describes her experience with giving birth and the joyful year of mothering that follows. The baby whose arrival she chronicles is the youngest of her three daughters but is also a composite of the biological children among the family's six. A keen observer of nature, Erdrich also movingly evokes wild-animal life and the seasonal changes that take place outside the secluded New Hampshire home of Erdrich and her husband, writer Michael Dorris. Although her mystical side is evident in her descriptions of the natural world and in her account of the strong bond she formed with her new baby, she also looks at life with refreshing common sense. She dismisses the "pseudo spiritual advice" that refers to intense labor pain as "discomfort" and admits to occasionally feeling resentment at her baby's screams. Erdrich lightens her prose with several recipes that she and her husband prepare together, as well as a menu for an all-licorice dinner. An enchanting, lyrical rendering of a "mother's vision."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Novelist Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction is a captivating account of her attempt to juggle the joys and demands of selfhood, writerhood, and motherhood. She and her husband, the writer Michael Dorris, are one of America's most famous literary couples and the parents of six children. The oldest three are adopted, their youngest three, all daughters, are their birth children. Dorris has written about their struggle with the consequences of one adopted son's affliction with fetal alcohol syndrome in The Broken Cord (1989). Now, in a much rosier book, Erdrich shares her piquant observations about pregnancy, birth, and caring for a newborn. Ever attuned to the natural world around her, Erdrich has used a seasonal structure for her account of a "birth year" and drawn connections between the stages she and her baby experience and the life cycles of the plants and creatures of the New Hampshire woods surrounding their home. Forthright and radiantly alive, Erdrich writes about all the magic and misery of motherhood and the often incompatible but, for her, inextricably connected arts of writing and mothering. By placing her life within the web of nature, she affirms our place in the cosmos; by articulating her innermost thoughts in such pristine and bracing prose, she affirms the glory and uniqueness of human consciousness. Donna Seaman
Ensconced in her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire and the cottage across the road where she writes, embraced by her devoted writer husband, Michael Dorris, and their several children, Erdrich (The Bingo Palace, LJ 1/94) is pregnant with her third daughter. She is attuned to the rhythms of nature, the movements of small animals, and the quickening of the baby inside her; in this journal she records impressionistically the birth and first seasons of her newborn's life. Her even, trusting prose is punctuated by dazzling observations of man, nature, and child: the solace she takes in burying her face into her husband's luxuriant hair while pushing her baby; the ecstatic tossing of trees in the wind, a landscape so different from her native North Dakota; the "sense of oceanic oneness" that only breastfeeding brings. Erdrich the writer and mother fuse seamlessly in this lyrical affirmation of generation; containing recipes prepared by Dorris, it is sure to be popular in all libraries.
Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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