CONTRADICTION DAYS

A poet and short story writer describes a pregnancy spent in Taos, New Mexico.

Novak begins her debut memoir with a list of things she wants to forget: her dog, impending motherhood, “my husband snoring beside me,” the changing shape of her body, and her “debt-pay-off plans,” among others. Instead, she focuses on the purpose of her trip to Taos, which is to research the artist Agnes Martin, who had recently become something of an obsession. A recovering anorexic and bulimic with diagnosed depression and an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, Novak is prone to flights of frightening anger that lead to violent rages that she is unable to recall after they pass. Pregnancy wreaked havoc on her vulnerabilities, disfiguring the body she spent years trying to control and tipping her into suicidal ideation that, her physician cruelly reminded her, endangered both her and her baby. “How impossible it is to be fully here—present in the present—when you’re pregnant,” she writes. “Pregnant, the present zips you between future and past.” In Taos, where she and her husband moved temporarily, Novak tried to survive her pregnancy by focusing on her research on Martin, an endeavor that morphed from a literary project into an attempt to transform into the abstract painter herself. “I was here to be like Agnes Martin, not relapse into the past,” she writes. The more she sank into Martin’s world, the more she descended into the complexity of her own bodily needs and desires as well as her deepest fears. Novak’s rhythmic prose is stunningly creative, clearly drawing on her poetic background. Structurally, though, the first third of the book drags, mostly because the author doesn’t explain the origin of her obsession with Martin or fully reveal her neurodiversity. Still, the majority of the story pulses with honesty and vulnerability, spiraling to a satisfying ending.

A lyrical memoir about pregnancy, mental illness, and art.