Knocked Down
A High-Risk Memoir
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A laugh-out-loud memoir about a free-spirited, commitment-phobic Brooklyn girl who, after a whirlwind romance, finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, pregnant, and faced with five months of doctor-prescribed bed rest because of unusually large fibroids.
Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months.
As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all?
Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Love, marriage, and a harrowing pregnancy yield a haunting story of survival in this gripping account from Weintraub (We Got Game!). After a year of dating, Weintraub married her partner, Chris, a New York City hedge fund trader, and the two moved in to his family's empty farmhouse in Accord, N.Y. When Weintraub became pregnant, the happy life they dreamt of living felt nearly complete, until doctors discovered that she had one tennis-ball- and two football-size fibroids competing for womb space and put her on strict bed rest; "The message was clear," she writes, "lie down for the next five months and don't get up. Ever." Delving into the mental and emotional toll she underwent in "near-solitary confinement" ("My only crime: an ailing cervix"), Weintraub details a constant "loop of anxiety," amplified by her and Chris's decision to purchase a troubled local business. As their marriage buckles under the strain, their dilapidated farmhouse becomes a poignant metaphor for their situation's fragility: "We had become so delicate... not wanting to give up anything, not even to each other." Weintraub balances her brutally frank account with hope and humor before finding the ultimate release in the delivery of her healthy baby boy. While the catharsis isn't easily given, there's beauty on every page.
