BABY LOVE: CHOOSING MOTHERHOOD AFTER A LIFETIME OF AMBIVALENCE | REBECCA WALKER (RIVERHEAD)
GRACE (EVENTUALLY): THOUGHTS ON FAITH | ANNE LAMOTT (RIVERHEAD)
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Ever since she arrived in the mid-90s as one of the loudest voices of third-wave feminism, Walker has formed her every thesis on the basis of personal experience. When it comes to identity politics, her life as a biracial, bisexual woman has provided her with some strong arguments. But in her new memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, her level of self-regard is staggering. An account of her first pregnancy, the book is posited as an attempt to successfully reconcile the traditional role of motherhood with lifelong feminist beliefs in freedom and independence. But apart from a few breezy passages of rhetoric in the first chapter, Walker barely touches the notion, instead subjecting us to a dull, puerile exhibition of her own baggage.
Baby Love reads less like a book than a compendium of mass e-mails Walker might’ve sent to let distant friends know how her second trimester was going. Her aimless and chatty rants should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s killed an afternoon randomly cycling through Blogspot accounts. “Heartbeat! Oh my God. The most outrageous thing I have ever heard,” she writes of her second prenatal exam. “Dr. Lowen was completely unimpressed, and she’s allowed considering she hears a gajillion baby heartbeats a day.” But her dumbstruck awe at the miracle of life doesn’t temper her righteous indignation when a nurse offers her a complimentary diaper bag full of formula samples and coupons. “I could take the appreciative and noncynical tack, but I can’t believe doctors allow themselves to be the middlemen and women for these companies. . . . It’s like commercials at the movies times a hundred.”
In the end, neither Lamott nor Walker manages to turn the nuts and bolts of the human grind into a structure that can keep us all afloat. They treat us like confidants rather than readers, unloading the kind of minutiae and tooth gnashing best reserved for the therapist’s office or end-of-the-day bitch sessions with a best friend. But therapists get paid to listen. Friends are invested in one another. No one else wants to hear it.
