Review by New York Times Review
ONE of the pill's most pernicious side effects is bloat in the publishing industry. For most of history, having a baby - or heck, a dozen - has simply been women's natural lot, not something they had time or inclination to examine at any length. Now the "journey to motherhood," as it is often called, is something to be feared, postponed, mulled and eventually exalted in endless memoirs, or "mom-oirs" (though plenty of dads are writing them too). The majority of these are extremely tedious. It's difficult to think of another subject so miraculous in its fundamentals, yet so banal in its particulars. Peggy Orenstein's journey, however, proved a suspenseful one over roiling seas; indeed, as recorded in "Waiting for Daisy," her unsparing new personal account, it threatened at times to become "The Poseidon Adventure." A journalist and author of pop-sociological studies about girls in school and about women struggling to find the much-ballyhooed work-life balance, Orenstein has made family issues the focus of her career, but creating a family of her own was always, well, an issue. At her first birthday party, little Peggy was handed a doll, which she flung petulantly to the floor, a gesture that proved prescient: throughout her mid-30s, despite the urging of her husband, a successful documentary filmmaker, she remained "chronically, maddeningly conflicted" about becoming a mother. Then, just after Orenstein decided to leap off the precipice into a pile of dirty diapers, she received a diagnosis of breast cancer, an ordeal dispatched in fewer than four pages. The rest of the book describes Orenstein's rapid descent into the surreal community of the subfertile, a place where normal social rules don't apply. We clamber briefly into bed with her and hubby ("there was something both sacred and carnal about the way Steven and I joined together," she writes, Danielle Steel briefly entering into her soul, "as if a wall between us, sheer as gossamer, had come down"). Before long it's off to expensive, arguably exploitative clinics for analysis of intimate bodily fluids (her "gorgeous" cervical mucus and his slightly more questionable semen); obsessive arrangement of travel schedules around ovulation; and submission to treatments derived from, among other odd things, the urine of nuns. After Orenstein endures three miscarriages, a fresh-faced young acquaintance is even enjoined, as the author dryly puts it, to "spot me a few gametes." Her friend Ayelet Waldman, author of "A Playdate With Death" and the rest of the "Mommy-Track Mysteries" series, helpfully suggests Orenstein receive Yom Kippur blessings next to the father of Waldman's four children, the writer Michael Chabon. "I call him 'the Sperminator,'" Waldman brags. "He can get anyone pregnant." When even that fails, there is a heart-wrenching adoption attempt overseas. It's to Orenstein's considerable credit that even when she's naked from the waist down, she never really takes her reporter's hat off, applying the same measured scrutiny to a junior-high-school boyfriend with a brood of 15 or the plight of women left barren and disfigured by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima as she does to her own ultimately happily resolved situation. Alas, the same can't be said for Rebecca Walker, the author of "Baby Love," a solipsistic open diary of gestation that shares the earthy, spontaneous form of Anne Lamott's child-rearing classic, "Operating Instructions," if not its transcendent quality. Like Orenstein, Walker shunned dolls and grew up profoundly ambivalent about becoming a parent, a prospective role complicated by her bisexuality and troubled relationship with her own mother, the novelist Alice Walker, whose intermittent airing here gives the reader the uncomfortable if fascinated feeling of sitting in on an unproductive family counseling session. The younger Walker musters thoughtful passages on abortion and feminism's obligations to men. Yet she sorely tests the reader's patience while settling into a pregnancy of privileged contemplation, achieved with relative ease under the ministrations of a homeopath - just one in a "small army of healers" she assembles for ailments that often seem more psychic than physical (though when her son is born with meconium in his lungs and sent to the neonatal intensive care unit, it comes as a profound relief that she jettisoned the plan for a home birth with a "polytheistic fiesta theme"). A Tibetan doctor, the daughter of one of the Dalai Lama's private physicians, offers her "little silk bags of herbs"; hovering in the background, meanwhile, are an osteopath, doula, pedicurist and masseuse. "What a bummer it is that I can't wear scent," Walker grouses when a spritz of perfume sets off morning sickness. She consoles herself with bad TV and indulges in repeated retail therapy. "The whole time I was shopping I was thinking that once the baby comes I will never shop again," she writes. "The thought was like walking into an airplane propeller." Not to begrudge the author such luxuries, but there was no need to make the world privy to them. Orenstein's interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy retinue comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé; Walker's merely a paean to pampering. Alexandra Jacobs is an editor at The New York Observer.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, Orenstein now offers a very personal account of her road to becoming a mother. Orenstein was a happily married 35-year-old when she decided she wanted to have a baby. While she knew it might not be easy (she had only one ovary and was heading into her late 30s), she had no idea of the troubles she'd face. First, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, fortunately treatable. After waiting the recommended recovery period, she miscarried with a dangerous "partial molar pregnancy," so she had to avoid becoming pregnant for at least six months. Soon she was riding the infertility roller coaster full-time, trying everything from acupuncture to IVF and egg donation. She endured depression and more miscarriages while spending untold thousands of dollars. Even her very understanding husband was beginning to lose patience, when, surprisingly, she got pregnant with her daughter, Daisy. While readers don't have to be fertility obsessed to enjoy this very witty memoir (with its ungainly subtitle), for the growing number of women struggling with infertility this book may become their new best friend. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Orenstein (Schoolgirls, 1994, etc.) chronicles her tortuous journey to motherhood. The author was 35, involved in a busy, successful career as a journalist and ambivalent about having a child, when her filmmaker husband broached the subject. A diagnosis of breast cancer six weeks later put the baby plans on hold, and Orenstein was 36 before she began trying in earnest to get pregnant. Her witty presentation of such nitty-gritty details as temperature charts, cervical-mucous consistency, sperm counts and timed intercourse at first make her memoir an amusing read. The mood shifts, however, with a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage, followed by another and then a third. One of the book's most moving chapters, which appeared in slightly different form in the New York Times Magazine, recounts the author's visit to a Buddhist temple in Tokyo; red-capped statues of infants lined the temple's shady path, offering ritual acknowledgement of the loss felt by women who miscarry a fetus (a taboo subject in the West). Orenstein's obsession with becoming pregnant increasingly placed a strain on her marriage. It eventually led her to spend thousands of dollars for in-vitro fertilization at clinics whose staff acted more like salesmen than doctors and treated her more like a customer than a patient. She tried acupuncture, another less-than-happy experience, and implantation of a donor egg, which failed. She and her Japanese-American husband finally decided to adopt a Japanese baby boy. That red-tape-snarled transaction became even more complicated when Orenstein discovered she was again pregnant. Would she end up with two babies, one or none? The answer is in the title. Intimate, funny/sad and remarkably self-revealing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
