Rating: 
Summary: A waste of time
Review: Slater is a neurotic whiny snob, and her experience of motherhood is far from the average. This book is an exercise in self-importance. She doesn't have an interesting answer to her title either: "I know things I didn't know before. I love like I did not love before, but how, or when, this happened, is really a mistery, steps of smoke."
Rating: 
Summary: personal, thought-provoking, and prosy
Review: Slater's book offers:a) an account of one woman's experience "crossing over" into Motherland.
b) her frank soul-searching about how to (and if one should) merge motherhood with mental illness (something which more than 1 in 5 Americans suffer with.)
c) an artful, beautifully worded style -- gratefully devoured by those seeking alternatives to cutesy-tootsie, sterile, soul-less, "What to Expect..." manuals. Regarding the reviewer who complained that there was no answer to the book's title, let me just ask this: Were you REALLY expecting an answer? I don't think anyone can diagram how love works... If you're expecting "answers" for the universal questions of life, try Wittgenstein. If you're looking for specific questions about labor/birth/delivery/ -- buy the Unofficial Guide to Pregnancy. But if you're interested in reading a moving account of one person's spiritual and personal journey into parenthood, this book is a winner.
Rating:
Summary: Cry me a river.
Review: This is a book I wanted to like. I enjoyed Ms. Slater's "Prozac Diary" (although, interestingly, she never seemed to be suffering from what you might term "major depression"--whininess and an overinflated sense of self-importance was more like it) and "Lying," while another exercise in self-indulgence, at least had wit, good writing and a certain honesty that redeemed it. Not so with this book, which is, to put it mildly, awful. It seems to be in vogue for women writers to pen memoirs about motherhood as a kind of self-improvement program--as in, "Yes, I was wonderful before, but motherhood has made me go such deeper and now I'm an even better writer and I Have It All." I'd expected better of Ms. Slater, but this book fits neatly into the trend, along with Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, Martha Beck's Expecting Adam, Suzanne Finnamore's Zygote Chronicles, and more (I'm sure Elizabeth Wurtzel will be weighing in soon.) Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, these ladies are all multi-degreed and Ivy League--I suppose that makes their issues much more important than those of the lumpen proletariat. Slater's book doesn't crack much new ground. Like the writers mentioned above, she's over-educated, a psychologist ("with over a hundred publications!") seeing herself occupying lofty heights as one of the intellectual elite. When she finds herself pregnant (her opening--a paragraph-long description of her urine--is priceless) she worries a lot about whether or not she'll be able to keep writing, presumably self-indulgent tomes like this one. Her husband tells her that she can "be the aunt"--in other words, he'll take all the responsibility for raising the baby, along with live-in help. Oh, how awful--a Mr. Mom and a full-time nanny. However will she keep writing? Her apparent "mental illness"--which seems to be little more than garden-variety dysthymia and very poor coping skills--is not examined in much depth, nor is her relationship to the long-suffering husband, who has to put up with her pronouncements such as "I hope you want this baby, because I sure don't." I also felt terrible for her live-in nanny, described as fat and pimply and whose major crime in life seems to have been not having wealthy parents to send her to Harvard. Much of the book revolves around her agonizing decision as to whether or not to keep taking Prozac and her raft of additional "meds," but again, it's not made clear why a woman in a comfortable marriage, with a seemingly good career--as a psychologist, for heaven's sake!--is in such dire need of drugs that are usually prescribed in such massive quantities only to hospital inpatients. The ending is neatly tied up with her telling her sister, "I feel like a mother"--yet she seems to have had no transforming experiences that warrant this conclusion. Her self-absorption, already boundless, seems to have only added the ego-gratifying, "And I'm a mommy!" Suffice it to say that I found this book almost offensive, and a huge disappointment from a once-talented writer. I won't be rushing to buy her next exercise in self-aggrandizement.
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