After Birth
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Sometimes I’m with the baby and I think: you’re my heart and my soul, and I would die for you. Other times I think: tiny moron, leave me the fuck alone
A year has passed since Ari gave birth and still she can’t locate herself in her altered universe. Sleep-deprived, lonely and unprepared, she struggles through the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights. Her own mother long dead and her girlhood friendships faded, she is a woman in need. When Mina – older, alone, pregnant – moves to town, Ari sees hope of a comrade-in-arms. Perhaps the hostile terrain could be more easily navigable together.
With purifying anger and outrageous humour, Elisa Albert unleashes on a culture that turns its new mothers into exiles, and expects them to act like natives. And as she defines the raw experience of motherhood, Albert offers a hilarious and devastatingly honest examination of how we become the women we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Albert (The Book of Dahlia) applies a blistering tone to modern motherhood in this cri de coeur of a novel. Six-months-pregnant Ari couldn't wait to leave Brooklyn for the faded glory of Utrecht, N.Y., and its affordable four-bedroom Italianate with her supportive professor husband, Paul, 15 years her senior. Now, Ari has one-year-old Walker, a C-section scar, and an unfinished dissertation in women's studies. Faculty life isn't the "deranged orgiastic laser show" she dreamed it would be. About the women in her C-section support group she says, "A chore, trying to talk to these women." So Ari pins her hopes for friendship and connection on Mina Morris, former bass player for the Misogynists, a late-'80s all-girl band. Mina is now a poet who is subletting from Ari's friends while they're on sabbatical. Into this thinly plotted story, Albert interweaves insightful portraits of Ari's extended family, childhood friends, and frenemies. Our sarcastic and self-aware heroine never spares us her anger, her epic takedowns ("It had an addictive flavor, hating her"), and her attempts to parse her own internalized misogyny. In lesser hands, Ari might be unlikable, but Albert imbues her with searing honesty and dark humor, and the result is a fascinating protagonist for this rich novel.
