After Birth
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A fierce novel about the postpartum experience filled with "dark humor and brutal honesty" (People).
A year has passed since Ari gave birth to Walker, though it went so badly awry she has trouble calling it "birth" and she still can't locate herself in her altered universe. Amid the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights, and another impending winter in upstate New York, Ari is a tree without roots, struggling to keep her branches aloft.
When Mina, a one-time cult indie musician—older, self-contained, alone, and nine months pregnant—moves to town, Ari sees the possibility of a new friend. And despite her unfortunate habit of generally mistrusting other females, they soon become comrades-in-arms . . .
With piercing insight about the isolation and unrealistic expectations suffered by new mothers in our society, After Birth is about pregnancy and childbirth that is "vicious, hilarious, and above all real" (The New York Times Book Review).
"[A] scaldingly and exhilaratingly honest account of new motherhood, emotional exile, and the complex romance of female friendship." —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
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.
