Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood - Hardcover

Enright, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022406293X ISBN 13: 9780224062930

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2004

Synopsis

Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. Her new book, Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two.

Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news - full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all. Easily confiding and full of advice from the front line, the book contains sections on buggies ('All women with buggies look like they are on welfare'), second pregnancies ('No one gives a toss about your second pregnancy. Get on with it'), evolution ('Humans give birth in pain so that they can't run away, afterwards'), not to mention how to get trolleyed while breastfeeding ('There are good reasons not to feed a baby while drunk, not all of them aesthetic').

Making Babies is an antidote to the po-faced, polemical 'How-to' baby books, but it also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. It is written from the heart of change: urgent, funny, passionate and wry. Anne Enright brings her entire self to this account of her life, as new life came out of it. She wrote it down as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

(2003-11-06)

About this title

Review:

Anne Enright 's style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro s; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O Brien s. --Colm T ib n

Winning and witty.

Winning and witty. "

[Enright s] first work of nonfiction, Making Babies is a collection of short essays, some of them stream of consciousness, that move chronologically through the landmarks of motherhood. She writes with brutal candor and irreverence about the things that the feel-good baby books don t tell you . --Moira Hodgson"

Anne Enright s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro s; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O Brien s.--Colm Toibin"

Keenly observed and gorgeously written one of the best books ever on the experience of being a mother. Because it s an experience so many of us share, Enright s fearless and funny inquiry into why motherhood feels the way it does is not only entertaining, it s deeply consoling."

[A] field guide to both the romance and reality of what it means to create and care for other humans, delivered by narration that evinces deep sincerity and the purest happiness.

Anne Enright's style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion's; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro's; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott's; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O'Brien's.--Colm Toibin

Keenly observed and gorgeously written... one of the best books ever on the experience of being a mother. Because it's an experience so many of us share, Enright's fearless and funny inquiry into why motherhood feels the way it does is not only entertaining, it's deeply consoling.

At once a memoir, a reference manual and a cautionary tale about the conflicting emotions of parenthood.... For those who've grown weary of hyped-up superparents and their relentless positivity, [Enright's] candor is welcome.

From the Publisher:

The Sunday Times and Irish Top Ten Bestselling book about motherhood

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 022406293X
• ISBN 13: 9780224062930
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208