The occasional book tour -- Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein
No, seriously. How can you not love a book fully entitled: "Waiting for Daisy -- A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother"?
Exactly.
Peggy Orenstein, author of Schoolgirls and Flux has written a memoir of unflinching honesty as she moves through her ambivalence to having a child to full-on obsession with getting pregnant, and then, staying pregnant. (Readers be warned, Oreinstein writes about three miscarriages in heart-shredding detail. )
She hits the highlights for any fertility memoir: doctors' visits, an acupuncturist's dirt tea, sliding into more and more outlandish "treatments" (there's this bit with nuns' urine) as the months tick by and she is still without child. These are the notes hit in any fertility memoir, and in lesser hands, it would be boring-assed boilerplate before the author is handed the deus ex machina baby on page 240.
But Orenstein goes deeper. In the middle of her struggle with infertility, she travels to Hiroshima and chronicles the emotional fallout of the events of August, 1945. She talks to survivors who later came to the States for medical care and plastic surgery as a gesture of goodwill. She meets a woman who has inherited her father's work of placing Hiroshima orphans in homes. She grieves for her own loss. She tentatively begins the process of adopting. The book moves into powerful, redemptive territory.
One thing that stuck in the back of my head as I read was how much I wanted Orenstein to become a mother. Even through the lowest pits of her journey, she maintains wit and grace, and aren't those values you'd like to see in today's parents?
Exactly.
No, seriously. How can you not love a book fully entitled: "Waiting for Daisy -- A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother"?
Exactly.
Peggy Orenstein, author of Schoolgirls and Flux has written a memoir of unflinching honesty as she moves through her ambivalence to having a child to full-on obsession with getting pregnant, and then, staying pregnant. (Readers be warned, Oreinstein writes about three miscarriages in heart-shredding detail. )
She hits the highlights for any fertility memoir: doctors' visits, an acupuncturist's dirt tea, sliding into more and more outlandish "treatments" (there's this bit with nuns' urine) as the months tick by and she is still without child. These are the notes hit in any fertility memoir, and in lesser hands, it would be boring-assed boilerplate before the author is handed the deus ex machina baby on page 240.
But Orenstein goes deeper. In the middle of her struggle with infertility, she travels to Hiroshima and chronicles the emotional fallout of the events of August, 1945. She talks to survivors who later came to the States for medical care and plastic surgery as a gesture of goodwill. She meets a woman who has inherited her father's work of placing Hiroshima orphans in homes. She grieves for her own loss. She tentatively begins the process of adopting. The book moves into powerful, redemptive territory.
One thing that stuck in the back of my head as I read was how much I wanted Orenstein to become a mother. Even through the lowest pits of her journey, she maintains wit and grace, and aren't those values you'd like to see in today's parents?
Exactly.
Labels: occasional blog book tour
2 Comments:
Sounds good! I'm always looking for another book to read.
Enjoyably written review that gives me actual information! Putting the book on my list.
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