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Title: Love Works Like This : Moving from One Kind of Life to Another by Lauren Slater ISBN: 0-375-50376-5 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 14 May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Honest and Informative
Comment: I've enjoyed other works of Lauren Slater, and this was no exception. It takes courage to write about the experiences she's had emotionally. Especially when it involves being heartfelt and honest about the giant step of having a baby.
Anyone who is pregnant or plans to become pregnant should read this book regardless of whether or not you have a history with depression or other mental illnesses. Many of the feelings and emotions Ms. Slater expresses about having a baby are ones that many women have, but are not honest enough to express. Reading about her experiences and emotions authenticates just how serious a choice having a baby is, not just for someone with mental illness, but for every responsible couple.
This is a good, informative and honest piece of writing. I would recommend it highly to anyone who wants an emotional look at what it's like to be pregnant. Ms. Slater is an excellent writer in both her use of imagery and emotion.
Rating: 1
Summary: Cry me a river.
Comment: This is a book I wanted to like. I enjoyed Ms. Slater's "Prozac Diary" (although, interestingly, she never seemed to be suffering from what you might term "major depression"--whininess and an overinflated sense of self-importance was more like it) and "Lying," while another exercise in self-indulgence, at least had wit, good writing and a certain honesty that redeemed it.
Not so with this book, which is, to put it mildly, awful. It seems to be in vogue for women writers to pen memoirs about motherhood as a kind of self-improvement program--as in, "Yes, I was wonderful before, but motherhood has made me go such deeper and now I'm an even better writer and I Have It All." I'd expected better of Ms. Slater, but this book fits neatly into the trend, along with Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, Martha Beck's Expecting Adam, Suzanne Finnamore's Zygote Chronicles, and more (I'm sure Elizabeth Wurtzel will be weighing in soon.) Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, these ladies are all multi-degreed and Ivy League--I suppose that makes their issues much more important than those of the lumpen proletariat.
Slater's book doesn't crack much new ground. Like the writers mentioned above, she's over-educated, a psychologist ("with over a hundred publications!") seeing herself occupying lofty heights as one of the intellectual elite. When she finds herself pregnant (her opening--a paragraph-long description of her urine--is priceless) she worries a lot about whether or not she'll be able to keep writing, presumably self-indulgent tomes like this one. Her husband tells her that she can "be the aunt"--in other words, he'll take all the responsibility for raising the baby, along with live-in help. Oh, how awful--a Mr. Mom and a full-time nanny. However will she keep writing? Her apparent "mental illness"--which seems to be little more than garden-variety dysthymia and very poor coping skills--is not examined in much depth, nor is her relationship to the long-suffering husband, who has to put up with her pronouncements such as "I hope you want this baby, because I sure don't." I also felt terrible for her live-in nanny, described as fat and pimply and whose major crime in life seems to have been not having wealthy parents to send her to Harvard.
Much of the book revolves around her agonizing decision as to whether or not to keep taking Prozac and her raft of additional "meds," but again, it's not made clear why a woman in a comfortable marriage, with a seemingly good career--as a psychologist, for heaven's sake!--is in such dire need of drugs that are usually prescribed in such massive quantities only to hospital inpatients. The ending is neatly tied up with her telling her sister, "I feel like a mother"--yet she seems to have had no transforming experiences that warrant this conclusion. Her self-absorption, already boundless, seems to have only added the ego-gratifying, "And I'm a mommy!"
Suffice it to say that I found this book almost offensive, and a huge disappointment from a once-talented writer. I won't be rushing to buy her next exercise in self-aggrandizement.
Rating: 5
Summary: an eloquent memoir, refreshingly frank
Comment: Lauren Slater is a highly gifted writer--her writing is eloquent, descriptive, and fluid. So this book is a pleasure to read just to experience her giftedness with language. She has a sense of humor and frankly and acknowledges a complicated constellation of emotions around her pregnancy and subsequent childbirth, (including ambivalence, anxiety, guilt) and the process of the unfolding attachment and love she comes to feel for her baby. The lengthy, difficult labor may be hard for some moms-to-be to read about, but again I appreciated its frankness--so many moms say they forget the difficulties of labor. This memoir is valuable for the many first-time moms, over-30 moms, those with "high risk" pregnancies, and those for whom depression is a concern and complicated medication decisions during pregnancy are a reality.
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Title: Misconceptions : Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood by Naomi Wolf ISBN: 0385497458 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It by Susan Maushart ISBN: 0140291784 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage by Cathi Hanauer ISBN: 0060936460 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Welcome to My Country by Lauren Slater ISBN: 0385487398 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 14 July, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater ISBN: 0140263942 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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