When the show was over, Grandma and I would make up stories. What if Sophia and the rest of the Girls took a trip back to Italy? What would happen if Blanche got married again and moved away? What was Dorothy’s son like, and would we ever get to see him? What if he moved to Florida, too, and fell in love with Blanche’s daughter? (Dorothy’s son eventually did arrive, and turned out to be gay, a revelation that sailed right over my eight-year-old head.) Grandma would bring me notebooks, leather-bound in robin’s-egg blue and pale pink, sometimes with the words MY DIARY in scrolling gold script on the cover. She’d bring boxes of felt-tipped pens, black and red and blue. “Write it down,” she would tell me. “Tell me a story.” When I’d complain that I didn’t know how to spell a word, didn’t know how to say what I wanted, or that I was tired, she’d put the pen in my hand, open the notebook to a fresh page, and say, “You’re not being graded. Just try.”
So we would watch, and, when I felt well enough, I would write the continuing adventures of the Golden Girls, sometimes guest-starring Grandma and me. Roommates would come and go, kids with broken legs or tonsil issues, just passing through. Once, I shared a room with a teenager recovering from her high-school-graduation-gift nose job. They wheeled her in just after a nurse had finished changing my bandages. The curtain was open, and, for a moment, we regarded each other. Both of her eyes were blackened, and her nose was in a splint, but, from her response, I guessed that I looked even worse. “Jesus, what happened to you?” she asked in a froggy, nasal voice, taking in my eye patch and the bandages on my cheek. Her parents shushed her. Grandma glared and jerked the curtain shut. The next morning, the girl was gone, and Grandma and I and our television set were alone again.
The summer slipped by in a syrupy, pain-spiked haze. It was a season without weather, because the hospital was always air-conditioned to the point of chilliness, a summer without any of the usual markers, picnics or fireworks or trips to the beach. On operation days, nurses would wake me up before dawn and wheel me into the operating room without so much as a sip of water. (“Why so early?” I asked, and my grandmother would make an uncharacteristically cynical face and said, “The doctors don’t want to miss their tee times.”) “You ready to go?” Grandma would whisper, bending close to me. Those mornings she didn’t bother with her makeup. I could see wrinkles around her lips, fanning out from the corners of her eyes, and deep grooves in her forehead and stretching from her nose to the corners of her lips. Her hair was still dark then—she dyed it, I knew; when I was home I’d help her brush the solution onto the spots she couldn’t reach. She was old, and the doctors and fathers who’d give the pretty nurses appreciative looks all ignored her, but to me, she was beautiful. I knew how she had looked, the beauty she’d once been. That beauty, I thought, was still there, like a layer of a shell hidden under subsequent accretions of mother-of-pearl, still there, if you looked closely enough.
“Remember,” she would tell me, “I’m going to be right there, waiting right outside.” She would hold my hand as they pushed my gurney down the hallway, letting go at the last possible moment, when the doors to the operating room swung open to let me through. Someone would poke a needle into the crook of my arm; someone else would position my head underneath the bright lights. “Count backward from ten,” a voice from nowhere would tell me, as the anesthesiologist put a mask over my mouth . . . but I’d never make it past seven. My eyelids would get heavy, my lips and tongue too heavy and immense to maneuver.
After my final surgery I jolted awake, my arms and legs itching, not knowing how long I’d been unconscious—days? Weeks? The right side of my face felt as if it had been soaked in gasoline and set on fire, with the invisible hand back, squeezing, squeezing. My right eye was bandaged and my left eye was stuck shut, the lashes pasted to my cheek with tears and blood and Betadine. The inside of my mouth, where the surgeons did most of their stitching, was so tender that for days all I’d be able to manage would be puddings and ice cream and milk-soaked Life cereal. The television and the notebooks were my anchors, my constants. “Write it,” Nana would tell me, her legs crossed at her trim ankles, her blouses perfectly pressed, in spite of a day in the punishing August heat. “Write it all down.”
“It hurts,” I managed, even though it was agony to move my jaw and tongue enough to even get those words out.
“I know,” said Grandma, stroking my hair. I picked up a pen with hands that felt as thick and clumsy as Mickey Mouse’s mittened extremitie. I remembered Katie and her mother walking through the curtains, bathed in the sunset’s apricot glow, headed back to the world of normal people, where nobody stared, where girls got normal things: friends, boyfriends, a husband, a home. I opened the notebook, and wrote I will never be beautiful. Then I shut my eyes, turned my face toward the wall, and pretended I’d fallen asleep.
That was the only night I ever saw my grandmother cry. She picked up the notebook, read what I’d written, closed it slowly, and turned toward the window. I saw her reflection in the glass, saw her shoulders hitching up and down, saw tears shining on her cheeks as she whispered, fiercely, over and over, not fair, not fair, not fair. I made myself stop looking, aware that what I was seeing was private, not meant for my eyes. The next morning, her cheeks were dry, her eyes were bright, her lipstick and mascara as perfect as ever. The page I’d written on had been missing from the notebook. It had been ripped out so neatly that it took me the rest of the summer to even notice that it was gone.
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Disconnected
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A Memoir of Grief (Continued)
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Read this unexpected love story, a timely novel about surrogacy, egg donation, and what it means to be a mother.
Then Came You
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Read this spooky short story about a woman whose late, abusive husband's voice seems to be inhabiting her GPS - and driving her towards danger.
Recalculating
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A short story about what can happen when one restless woman's best laid travel plans go astray. . .
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An engrossing novel about a picture-perfect Connecticut town disrupted by the murder of a neighborhood mother.
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About the Author
JENNIFER WEINER is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, which was made into a major motion picture, and Then Came You. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Philadelphia with her family. To learn more, visit www.jenniferweiner.com.
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About Atria Books
Atria Books was launched in April 2002 by publisher Judith Curr as a new hardcover and paperback imprint within Simon & Schuster, Inc. The name Atria (the plural of atrium—a central living space open to the air and sky) reflects our goals as publishers: to create an environment that is always open to new ideas and where our authors and their books can flourish. We look for innovative ways to connect writers and readers, integrating the best practices of traditional publishing with the latest innovations in the digital world. We are committed to publishing a wide range of fiction and nonfiction for readers of all tastes and interests.
The first book published under the Atria name, The Right Words at the Right Time by Marlo Thomas, became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, and since then Atria has gone on to publish more than 185 New York Times bestsellers. Atria is the publishing home to many major bestselling authors including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Jude Deveraux, Vince Flynn, T.D. Jakes, Shirley MacLaine, Kate Morton, Jodi Picoult, Sister Souljah, Brad Thor, Jennifer Weiner, Lauren Weisberger, Zane, and Rhonda Byrne, author of the international bestsellers The Secret and The Power.
In recent years, the imprint has placed a strategic emphasis on publishing for diverse audiences through the acquisition of the African American–oriented press Strebor Books, the launch of Atria Books Español, and co-publishing agreements with Beyond Words Publishers and Cash Money Records. Atria Books also publishes literary fiction and topical nonfiction in trade paperback under the Washington Square Press imprint, and popular fiction and nonfiction under the Emily Bestler Books imprint, launched in 2011.
Atria—books that entertain and enlighten.
A CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER WEINER
Q: Motherhood is sometimes thought to be a blissful, unequivocally fulfilling experience. Your book shows the real, complex, sometimes less-than-perfect world in which young mothers sometimes find themselves. Why did you think this book needed to be written?
A: Like every other pregnant woman I know, I became completely addicted to A Baby Story on the Learning Channel. For the uninitiated, A Baby Story is a half-hour show following a woman and her partner through their baby’s birth. The first ten minutes or so, viewers meet the mother, learn a little about her life, hear her talk about her hopes for the birth. The next fifteen minutes are the delivery itself—in the hospital, with a midwife, underwater, whatever. Then there’s usually a commercial break, and then we flash forward six to eight weeks, and there’s the happy mother, and the new baby, usually in a cute outfit, and the mother gives the baby a bottle, or changes her diaper, and beams joyously at the camera, and then the credits roll.
Needless to say, this gave me a somewhat skewed idea of what the early days of my own baby’s life would be like. I remember one specific night—Lucy’s second night at home. My milk hadn’t come in yet; my daughter absolutely refused to breast-feed and regarded my breasts with all of the enthusiasm of a discerning diner greeting a pair of decaying melons. Of course, I’d read a number of books advancing the viewpoint that a mother who did not breast-feed was more or less the maternal equivalent of Saddam Hussein, I was completely beside myself, and I was trying to follow the advice of three or four different lactation consultants at the same time, which meant pumping for half an hour every three hours, so I was sore and sleep-deprived and generally not a happy camper.
That night, Lucy started crying, and she would not stop. Nothing we could do would calm her—not a fresh diaper, not a bottle, not being held and swaddled, not being rocked, not being sung to. Not the bouncy seat, not the stroller, not a drive in the car. Not darkness, not light, not music, not silence, not her crib, not our bed. Nothing. I think at one point, rounding the corner into Hour Three of Inconsolable Infant, my husband and I looked at each other and realized that we were completely and utterly helpless, and not all of our work experience or advanced degrees or all the classes we’d taken or the books we’d read were going to get us out of this mess. At that moment, when I wailed, “How come the frickin’ Baby Story didn’t show me THIS?!?!” a book was born.
Having said that, though, don’t think I’ve ever started a book with the question, “Does this book need to be written?” I’m a firm believer in Flaubert’s idea that writers don’t choose their subject matter; the subject matter chooses them. And with this book . . . well, I hardly had any choice at all. I’d finished a first draft of another book before Lucy’s arrival. Six weeks after she arrived, when I was ready to start writing again, that book didn’t interest me at all. The only story I wanted to tell—the only subject that interested me—was the journey I’d been on. Perhaps because I was so deep in the thick of it, pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood felt like rich and wonderful terrain to explore. (Rich, and wonderful, and not much like the baby books told me it would be!)
Now that Lucy and I have both successfully survived Year One, I can also say writing this book was one of the only things that kept me sane. There would be days where something would happen—something funny, something awful, something scary—in the morning—and by the afternoon it had been transmuted into fiction.
Q: The new mothers in your novel struggle with a number of problems that have been explored recently in nonfiction. Even Becky has read Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions. Did any recent work in this area give you inspiration for the characters, plot, or issues in Little Earthquakes?
A: Once I became a mother, I had a lot less time for recreational reading and keeping up with the hot-button topics of the day . . . but you’d have to be living in a cave to not have some understanding of how contested pregnancy, birth, and especially motherhood has become. And of course, as an avid reader and former English major, I prepared for birth and motherhood by reading everything I could—from Dr. Sears’s attachment-parenting manifestos to Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. I read Naomi Wolf and Birthing from Within; I researched doulas online, took a twelve-week natural childbirth course, and attended La Leche League meetings ahead of time. Girlfriends’ Guides? Got ’em. What to Expect When Your Baby Accidentally Swallows a Hit of Ecstasy? That, too.
My theory of modern motherhood—which I’m now sharing for the first time—is that the generation of children being born to my peer group is the most intended bunch of babies who have ever existed. We’ve had careers, we’ve married probably later than our mothers did; we live in a world where having babies is no longer the automatic choice it was twenty or forty years ago. And damnit, we’re going to be successful at raising our kids—the same way we successfully managed our careers; the same way we successfully survived our twenties. If there’s a book that says it’s got the answers to raising happy, healthy, cheerful kids who will get in the nursery school, elementary school and, eventually, college of their choice, you darn well better bet that we’ll read it, dog-ear it, discuss it, and do our absolute best to live up to it, whether it’s Dr. Sears advising moms to wear their babies in slings while cooking dinner or emptying the dishwasher (the one time I attempted it I almost dropped Lucy on the drainer) or the Baby Whisperer mandating no nap
s after mealtime. When I started writing I knew that I wanted to have some fun with those books and the culture of perfection in parenting that turns them into bestsellers, and turns otherwise bright, savvy, sensible women into zombies regurgitating lines from Sears or Ferber or Happiest Baby on the Block.
It’s no accident that the initials of the book Ayinde adopts as her bible are B.S. . . . and in creating that book I pulled some of the more extreme elements from all of the different books I’d swallowed whole when I was expecting—Dr. Sears at his most unrealistic, Tracy Hogg at her least intuitive; Caitlin Flanagan, a conservative social critic who’s made a career of guilt-tripping working mothers, at her most judgmental and shrill. One of the funniest parts of the editing process was when I got a note from an editor in the margin next to the section where Baby Success talks about co-sleeping until the kids are five. “I didn’t know we were entering the realm of satire,” the editor wrote. I had to email her and tell her this was actual advice from an actual, widely read and respected guide to newborns!
There were also some ripped-from-the-headline elements that made it into this story. The Kobe Bryant case happened when Lucy was six weeks old, and Kobe Bryant’s daughter was six months old. I remember being so struck by that story, and watched it unfold with a kind of horrified fascination, all the while wondering what I’d do if I had a baby just a little older than Lucy and my husband was involved in a scandal like that. I thought a lot about what would prompt a man with a baby and a beautiful wife at home to cheat (let alone rape) . . . and about how the wife and child could survive the situation, given what the media would undoubtedly do to them.
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