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3.69 AVERAGE
3.69 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Whether you're contemplating motherhood or not (but especially if you are), this is a must read. I really appreciated how nuanced the author was in presenting the complex and sometimes opposing and complex thoughts and feelings that come when considering what it means to be a mother vs not. Her reflections were existential, philosophical, and genuinely interesting.
I think the subject isn’t one that I’m interested in at this time.
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Perhaps I should have come in without expectations and maybe would have liked this more, but I was expecting something exploring the pros and cons of motherhood from an investigative angle, whereas this just felt like a journal of a very distraught woman struggling with making it through the last years of still having access to enter into the cult of motherhood. Spoiler alert: she never does become a mother and seems quite happy with this choice at the end. Going in, it felt like she had already made that decision though (or rather her boyfriend had made it for her), and had felt the need to spend 280 pages and much coin tossing to justify her decision to listen to her man instead of herself.
This book has a heavy spiritual angle, and much of it involved the author playing a self-created version of I Ching with three coins to try to figure out the meaning behind her life. She also frequents a few fortune tellers. This was not the decision-making framework I was hoping to find, but I also see the appeal. My problem with her approach was that there was no method to the madness - no explanation of how she came upon her methods of spiritual awakening or what the goal of her coin tossing game really was. It felt like things I'd come across young people in Bushwick playing in an attempt to find spirituality and ritual in a post religious world. I'm sure that she felt cool and hip tossing coins and looking at pretty tarot cards to make hard decisions about life, but none of it felt particularly enlightening for me as the reader. In the end, she finally achieves clarity by taking anti-depressants, which also felt like a giant cop out (to her credit she note this) after having to endure so many pages of listening to her ask questions of coins whose answers make very little sense.
Then there is her relationship with her boyfriend(?) Miles. He mostly sounds like a douche, although towards the end she does admit that perhaps she was painting him in a more negative light than he deserved because of her depression issue. He is very clearly very adamant about not wanting to have kids with her. Which is pretty egotistic considering the fact that he has a daughter with another woman but she does not seem to care. The author is completely enamored of him and will forgive him anything, including making the decision for her of whether or not children should be in their future. I'm sure that she has spent much of her life avoiding having children, but it often felt like deep inside she did want a child but would allow Miles to talk her out of it. I can understand her dependence and love for Miles and I'm sure that there are many women who shower love of even less deserving men but to write a book claiming to be a woman's exploration of the question of whether to embrace motherhood when her main factor in her choice is a man's opinion seems unfair to the reader. Perhaps the book was really a cry for help, showing that the patriarchy has infiltrated even the most sacred of female spaces. The point where I really lost it was when she says that she decided to get an IUD because her friend says that men like to come inside things. That one incident just really told me all I needed to know about her relationship with Miles - she'll act like a doormat to satisfy any of his whims and do it so wholeheartedly that he doesn't even have to bother noticing what she's sacrificing for his sake.
The book does have many interesting bits, where she actually delves into the reasons for societal distrust of childless women and the reasons women rightfully can have for making the decision to not have children. I'd never thought of many of them before and I just wish those had been the focus of the book, instead of the avant garde spiritual soul searching and her relationship with Miles. I'm also very curious about her life in 5-10 years: is she still with Miles; does she regret choosing not to have children?
This book has a heavy spiritual angle, and much of it involved the author playing a self-created version of I Ching with three coins to try to figure out the meaning behind her life. She also frequents a few fortune tellers. This was not the decision-making framework I was hoping to find, but I also see the appeal. My problem with her approach was that there was no method to the madness - no explanation of how she came upon her methods of spiritual awakening or what the goal of her coin tossing game really was. It felt like things I'd come across young people in Bushwick playing in an attempt to find spirituality and ritual in a post religious world. I'm sure that she felt cool and hip tossing coins and looking at pretty tarot cards to make hard decisions about life, but none of it felt particularly enlightening for me as the reader. In the end, she finally achieves clarity by taking anti-depressants, which also felt like a giant cop out (to her credit she note this) after having to endure so many pages of listening to her ask questions of coins whose answers make very little sense.
Then there is her relationship with her boyfriend(?) Miles. He mostly sounds like a douche, although towards the end she does admit that perhaps she was painting him in a more negative light than he deserved because of her depression issue. He is very clearly very adamant about not wanting to have kids with her. Which is pretty egotistic considering the fact that he has a daughter with another woman but she does not seem to care. The author is completely enamored of him and will forgive him anything, including making the decision for her of whether or not children should be in their future. I'm sure that she has spent much of her life avoiding having children, but it often felt like deep inside she did want a child but would allow Miles to talk her out of it. I can understand her dependence and love for Miles and I'm sure that there are many women who shower love of even less deserving men but to write a book claiming to be a woman's exploration of the question of whether to embrace motherhood when her main factor in her choice is a man's opinion seems unfair to the reader. Perhaps the book was really a cry for help, showing that the patriarchy has infiltrated even the most sacred of female spaces. The point where I really lost it was when she says that she decided to get an IUD because her friend says that men like to come inside things. That one incident just really told me all I needed to know about her relationship with Miles - she'll act like a doormat to satisfy any of his whims and do it so wholeheartedly that he doesn't even have to bother noticing what she's sacrificing for his sake.
The book does have many interesting bits, where she actually delves into the reasons for societal distrust of childless women and the reasons women rightfully can have for making the decision to not have children. I'd never thought of many of them before and I just wish those had been the focus of the book, instead of the avant garde spiritual soul searching and her relationship with Miles. I'm also very curious about her life in 5-10 years: is she still with Miles; does she regret choosing not to have children?
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I found the narrator annoying. The book contains some interesting and insightful reflections, for instance on how having a grandparent who spent time in concentration camps can create a sense of obligation to procreate. Other parts were filled with overblown and self-important philosophical ramblings that I'd rather not have wasted my time on.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
In awe of seeing the full spectrum of feeling and nuance and pressure and comparison that is being a woman in your late 30s without a child, being reckoned with, wrangled with in cutting prose. Some parts of this is I did disassociate a little. But for the most I was the opposite, so over associated it hurt. Stealing this for when people ask me the kid question: “I love the people who exist already, and there are so many books to read, and so much silence to inhabit.” Grateful to see ambivalence towards having children not reconciled simply by having children.