I have read, glanced at, flicked through and even enjoyed a lot of baby books but I have never read anything as brilliant as this.  In short, lyrical, highly evocative passages she traces her emotions through pregnancy to the terrible twos.  Subtitled “Stumbling into Motherhood” she records the highs and lows, the raw love, the mess, the fear and a pure zest for life as it happens.  It’s fantastic, highly recommended whether you have a baby or not.

Synopsis

Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. Her new book, 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. Easily confiding and full of advice from the front line, the book contains sections on buggies ('All women with buggies look like they are on welfare'), second pregnancies ('No one gives a toss about your second pregnancy. Get on with it'), evolution ('Humans give birth in pain so that they can't run away, afterwards'), not to mention how to get trolleyed while breastfeeding ('There are good reasons not to feed a baby while drunk, not all of them aesthetic').

Making Babies is an antidote to the po-faced, polemical 'How-to' baby books, but it also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. It is written from the heart of change: urgent, funny, passionate and wry.

Anne Enright brings her entire self to this account of her life, as new life came out of it. She wrote it down as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

About the Author

Anne Enright was born in Dublin and now lives and works in County Wicklow. She is the author of a collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation