edited by Kate Cockrill Lucia Leandro Gimeno Steph Herold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2014
By telling the untold, these essays illuminate and help normalize reproductive experiences outside the norm.
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Seventeen short essays explore nonstereotypical experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-raising, including the choice to be child-free.
In January 2014, the Sea Change Program (“a nonprofit organization committed to a world that upholds the dignity and humanity of all people as they move through their reproductive lives”) advertised on Twitter and Facebook for personal stories about stigmatized reproductive experiences. (The editors note that their first submissions were all “from ciswomen,” but after further outreach, “we are glad to have included experiences from straight, queer, trans, and intersex people.”) Because stigmas thrive in an atmosphere of silence, the editors aim to publish stories that usually go untold, even to family and friends. The personal essays discuss topics that include egg donation, remaining childless, open adoption, abortion, and parenting while trans. The stories are often wrenching, whether it’s the panic of a young girl (as young as 13) discovering she’s pregnant or grief over being unable to conceive. In “If,” a particularly well-written and moving essay by Susan Ito, her life-threatening pre-eclampsia requires abortion of a wanted baby. In a heartbreaking image, after the injection, she puts her hands on her stomach, where not long ago, she’d felt her baby kick: He “jumped against my hand once. He leaped through the space into the darkness and then was gone. All gone.” Questions of identity plague several writers, like the young woman whose baby was adopted; she asks, “[B]ut am I really a mother?” Other common experiences include dealing with uncaring or quickly absent birth fathers and family members who may be unsupportive: “My aunt asked me why I had been gardening the day of the miscarriage, as though my pulling weeds had somehow caused the babies to dislodge.” Most contributions are from the well-educated and accomplished, mirroring the editors’ circles of book club, Facebook, and Twitter friends, but several are from those who’ve faced poverty and prejudice.
By telling the untold, these essays illuminate and help normalize reproductive experiences outside the norm.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500248512
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
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