Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kjones31 's review for:
3.5 stars. I’ll file this one away with books like [b:Crime and Punishment|7144|Crime and Punishment|Fyodor Dostoyevsky|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1382846449s/7144.jpg|3393917], [b:Gone with the Wind|18405|Gone with the Wind|Margaret Mitchell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328025229s/18405.jpg|3358283], [b:American Savage|16101100|American Savage Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics|Dan Savage|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1353100051s/16101100.jpg|21911401], and plays like “Rent” that help expand my thinking and build my empathy muscles without actually changing the core of what feels right and true for my own life. (Meaning yes, I’m still interested in having children, thanks for asking.) My favorite essay was the closing one by the fabulous and droll Tim Kreider. If I can borrow from his previous work, [b:We Learn Nothing|13259887|We Learn Nothing|Tim Kreider|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344396590s/13259887.jpg|18461390], he says:
What bothered me about Shriver’s essay was the way she wants to be “allowed” to feel sad about the educated white population declining in dominance in America, as if institutionalized privilege hasn’t always allowed white people, men in particular, to have outsized power and influence relative to their numbers—and as if this won’t continue to be true long after they/we have stopped being the demographic majority. I get what she’s saying about feeling like a lot of the people who end up having children are not necessarily the folks best equipped to do so, financially or otherwise. And sure, change can be instinctively unsettling; a knee-jerk reaction sort of makes sense if you feel your cultural hegemony is threatened. But I expected Shriver to be more insightful and nuanced than that. Of all the reasons to be bothered by not having children, failing to propagate the population of European Americans just does not resonate with me in the 21st century. It’s a bad proxy for whatever’s really bothering her. Or maybe I’m just really naive and she is being that racist, openly.
So on the whole, a worthy and thought-provoking read. As the editor herself noted in the introduction, this compilation suffers a bit for its lack of diversity; there was quite a bit of repetition across essays and some voices were certainly missing. It was also surprisingly humorless until the end. Nonetheless, a good addition to the conversation that we’re not really having.
“One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.”That’s a pretty good summary of what this book is trying to combat. Both the men and the women who wrote essays for this anthology highlighted the cultural implications of childlessness, with most—including the men—noting that women are particularly hard-hit by accusations of selfishness and brokenness, as if they must be borderline pathological not to want children. There was plenty of childhood sadness to go around in this volume, but that’s probably true if you pull together any group of sixteen adults, parents or not. As Danielle Henderson said,
“A lot of people who had terrible childhoods have kids to prove that they can do a better job, or to fix some cosmic rift by being the parents they needed to their own children. I sometimes wonder why I fall into the category of people who responded to their own crappy childhoods by never wanting to have kids. It’s possible that I’m not very brave; you have to have a lot of hope and faith that you’ve somehow learned everything your family was supposed to teach you but didn’t. You have to tell yourself you’ll be able to avoid the pitfalls you grew up with. But, even then, you create new pitfalls. I negotiate the terms of my life every day and work hard to maintain an emotional status quo that I had to create from scratch. That’s hard to do with a child in tow.” (p. 156-57)I come down pretty hard siding with Henderson that “selfish” is not a word that applies to that kind of choice. Conversely, imposing your own unresolved issues on a child who didn’t ask for them is hardly the image of selflessness. She goes on:
“I admire women who look at the rigors of parenting and decide they’re just not cut out for it, or just don’t want to try, and I wish that we had more conversations about childlessness that didn’t force us to approach them from such a defensive place. I’m also sensitive to the fact that there are plenty of women in the world who want children and are unable to have them naturally, or women who have miscarried, often more than once, on their journey to parenthood. It seems hostile and uncaring to have a conversation about motherhood that is rooted in selfishness when so many women are unable to walk down that road.” (p. 158-59)For as many times as I found myself nodding along in agreement, as with Henderson, there was a lot here that gave me real pause. A couple of these essays were upsetting (I’m looking at you, Lionel Shriver!) but worth reading anyway because they’re honest. Speaking your own ugly truth is hardly the worst thing an author can do. Actually, that’s probably why we need authors.
What bothered me about Shriver’s essay was the way she wants to be “allowed” to feel sad about the educated white population declining in dominance in America, as if institutionalized privilege hasn’t always allowed white people, men in particular, to have outsized power and influence relative to their numbers—and as if this won’t continue to be true long after they/we have stopped being the demographic majority. I get what she’s saying about feeling like a lot of the people who end up having children are not necessarily the folks best equipped to do so, financially or otherwise. And sure, change can be instinctively unsettling; a knee-jerk reaction sort of makes sense if you feel your cultural hegemony is threatened. But I expected Shriver to be more insightful and nuanced than that. Of all the reasons to be bothered by not having children, failing to propagate the population of European Americans just does not resonate with me in the 21st century. It’s a bad proxy for whatever’s really bothering her. Or maybe I’m just really naive and she is being that racist, openly.
So on the whole, a worthy and thought-provoking read. As the editor herself noted in the introduction, this compilation suffers a bit for its lack of diversity; there was quite a bit of repetition across essays and some voices were certainly missing. It was also surprisingly humorless until the end. Nonetheless, a good addition to the conversation that we’re not really having.