Loved and Wanted
A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
'Haunting, wild, and quiet at once. A shimmering look at motherhood, in all gothic pain and glory. I could not stop reading.' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women
A harrowing account of one woman's reckoning with life, death and choice in Trump's America. For readers of Educated and Hillbilly Elegy.
In 2017, Christa Parravani had recently moved her family from California to West Virginia. Surviving on a teacher's salary, she was already raising two young children with her husband, screenwriter Anthony Swofford.
Another pregnancy, a year after giving birth to her second child, came as a shock. Christa had a history of ectopic pregnancies and was worried that she wouldn't be able to find adequate medical care. She immediately requested a termination - but her doctor refused to help. The only doctor who would perform an abortion made it clear that this would be illicit, not condoned by her colleagues or their community.
In exploring her own choice, or rather in discovering her lack of it, Christa reveals the desperate state of female healthcare in contemporary America.
'A brutally honest, rollercoaster of a journey that left me championing her bravery.' Esther Freud
'I will never forget this book. Read it. This is all I can say.' Rachel Louise Snyder
'Stunningly good' The Bookseller
'Everyone should read this book' Sarah Mansugo
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parravani (Her) exposes motherhood's serrated edges in this searing exploration of love, autonomy, and abortion. Forty-year-old Parravani was deeply in debt and unexpectedly pregnant with her third child in 2017, and her tenure-track position at a West Virginia college provided the family's only stable income, but still fell short of covering the bills. Certain this pregnancy spelled the end of her career, Parravani wanted an abortion, to which her husband responded, "It's your body." But one local gynecologist refused her request, and another would only prescribe her RU 486 if she promised not to tell anyone else at the practice. "Reduced to a vessel, I was rage-filled," she writes. Options elsewhere were too far away and expensive to be practical. "Every path seemed strung with a trip wire." Throughout, Parravani elucidates the nation's patchwork of abortion laws and data about women who seek to end their pregnancies, finding that states that restrict reproductive freedoms also have the poorest health outcomes for infants and children. From the point at which Parravani decides to carry her son to term, the book turns to building a devastating indictment of how environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare harmed the two of her children born in West Virginia. This is a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today.
