Making Babies
the Sunday Times bestselling memoir of stumbling into motherhood
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny' Maggie O'Farrell
It's 2004 and Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy.
Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two. Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news - full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all.
An antidote to the high-minded, polemical 'How-to' baby manuals, Making Babies also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. Anne Enright wrote the truth of it as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Enright's only work of nonfiction, the Man Booker Prize winning Irish author (The Gathering) describes what it's like to become a mother at 37, 18 years into her marriage. The narrative veers from the hilarious ("Martin looks at me over the back of his chair. He gives me a thumbs-up, as if to say, Isn't this a blast? And there's football on the telly!" At 9.35 and 20 seconds I am, for the first time, in serious pain") to the brutally honest ("I never liked being around nursing women there was always too much love, too much need in the room") to pure wonder not so much at the miracle of the baby itself (although that is certainly present), but that she is a mother. And that she isn't half bad at it. In fact, she's good at it. The reader might wonder why she's so surprised at all this until the last chapter. And then we realize that this book, above all, is about the redemptive power of having children: by the end of the memoir, she is finally "completely happy."