Review: Touching But Never Sappy Tale of Unexpected Motherhood and Illness
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 13, 2011
For writing about a baby in chemotherapy, Nehring comes up with a piece that is gripping (can something you read on a mobile device be a "page-turner"?) and real and honest and not sappy or morbid. It's about being a single mom and a new mom and an unexpected mom and the mom of a sick baby, and also about illness itself. It's about fashion ("resistance through color") and struggle and faith and the clash between personal and professional. Nehring, the author of A Vindication of Love, also dares to compare parental love with romantic love, and tackles ideas about illness as a metaphor for war, while telling the story of her daughter's struggle.I appreciated that Nehring told the story of how Eurydice came to be born without scorn for her daughter's father or his disinterest in his daughter; his actions speak for themselves. This is a story of parenthood, but Nehring also touches on her struggle to have a foothold in the professional world while her daughter was so very ill, and also writes optimistically about her views on love: "I believe that romantic love can be a form of heroism and of feminism." She takes us inside the hospital's walls and shows how she and her daughter, a team of two, held steady and weathered what was a precarious battle with spirit. She doesn't devolve into self-despair, even when writing about what could be the worst case scenario, and her essay is stronger for the moments of tenderness and fear that do occasionally pop up as well as what I sensed was her belief and faith that her daughter would emerge victorious.Kudos to Nehring and Amazon for utilizing the technology to add a welcome set of photos at the end that illuminate the text and show Nehring's daughter Eurydice around the world on the travels she writes about in the essay. While the piece stands alone, these are a great addition.