Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers
Novelists Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints, 2011) and Solomon (The Little Bride, 2011) invited writers and mothers to share their birth stories, and the resulting book includes more than two dozen essays by such accomplished authors as Julia Glass, Dani Shapiro, Cheryl Strayed, and Joanna Smith Rakoff. Their true tales encapsulate a wide array of births, among them home births, unmedicated deliveries, cesarean sections, twin births, precipitous labors, preterm deliveries, and the experience of an adoptive mother present for a birth mother’s delivery. The authors capture the heightened emotions and physical demands of labor in beautiful, heart-wrenching, and sometimes graphic language. This isn’t a how-to book, nor does it present a case for the “perfect birth,” which sets it apart from the plethora of childbirth manuals and lends it broader appeal and a very different type of resonance. --Aleksandra Walker