Description:
Carole Maso, an experimental novelist, brings all her imaginative gifts to bear on this fragmented but sparkling journal of her pregnancy and the first weeks after her daughter Rose's birth. Although she was over 40 when she decided to have a child, she and her partner Helen had prayed for one at the Church of St. Clare in Assisi, and in fact all across Tuscany and Umbria, as if the churches of Manhattan were further from God, or it was harder to hear prayer over the traffic. When the sign of a miracle arrives--in the form of a home pregnancy test--Maso is ready to meet it with words. Although she is a far more lyrical writer than Anne Lamott, there is a similar urge in them to tell the truth about themselves, even when it is less than flattering, and not to let a fear of sentimentality choke the expression of what are, after all, some of the most profound emotions a woman will ever feel. Not for nothing does Maso quote the brave and ferocious Virginia Woolf several times in this volume. Moving between the "glow" of pregnancy--a sense that for the first time she is truly alive, and not just advancing toward death--and the fears and depression that her ruminations have brought on, Maso tracks the beginnings of another life, one that will be connected to her, through her body, until its own end. Any new mother of a literary bent will relish Maso's observations, from the tart to the sublime: "Doubt very much I am going to wear a scarf around my head during labor. The last thing I want is to look like David Foster Wallace, and, after the birth, "I'll start a baby book soon. For remembrance. Baby and book--the two most beautiful words in the language." She's forgotten the third, though: mother. --Regina Marler
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