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.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
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.
Making Babies features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
Making Babies is available in Paperback, Hardback
Making Babies was written by Anne Enright and published by Vintage
Making Babies has 195 pages
£8.99
