Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood

by Anne Enright

Overview

“One of the best books ever on the experience of being a mother.”—Boston Sunday Globe

Anne Enright was married for eighteen years before she and her husband started having children. Already a confident, successful novelist, Enright continued to work after each of her two children was born; while each baby slept, those first two years of life, Enright wrote in dispatches about the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of motherhood. Supremely observant and endlessly quizzical, Enright “has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness” (Sunday Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393338287
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/29/2013
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anne Enright is the author of eight novels, most recently The Wren. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. In 2022, Enright was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives and works in Dublin.

Table of Contents

Apologies All Round 11

Breeding 15

The Glass Wall 23

Dream-Time 25

Birth 35

Milk 48

Nine Months 57

Time 74

Advice 82

Being Two 87

Groundhog Day 98

Science 107

Babies: A Breeder's Guide 120

God 120

Buggies 121

Staring 126

Home Birth 126

Wriggles 128

Naming 129

Burps 131

Hands 133

Girl / Boy 134

Crying 134

Evolution 142

Authority 143

Poo 143

Smell 144

Too Much Information 145

Baby-Talk 146

The Killing Cup 148

Kissing 151

How to Panic 151

Romance 153

The Lip of the Rug 154

By the Time You Read This, It Will be True 154

Staring, Part 2 155

What's Wrong with Velcro? 156

Unforgiven 160

Fair 163

Second Pregnancies 165

Siblings 165

Toys 166

Dirt 166

Other Mothers, Other Fathers 171

How to Get Trolleyed While Breast-Feeding 172

Entertaining 178

On Giving Birth to a Genius 178

Dreams 178

Speech 179

On Being Loved 180

It's Not About You, You Know 181

It's Not About You, You Know, Part 2 182

The Moment 183

Worry 183

Forgetting 187

What It Does 187

Oh, Mortality 190

Acknowledgements 205

What People are Saying About This

Colm Toibin

Anne Enright’s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro’s; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s.

Editorial Reviews

"To write well in the mother-child arena, a person must understand that the essential condition of motherhood . . . is absurdity. Samuel Beckett could have come up with a great book on babies. Anne Enright has."

New York Times Book Review - Judith Newman

"An oddly sweet-and-sour but loving memoir about becoming a mother."

New York Times - Dwight Garner

"Equal parts wryly analytical and wholeheartedly emotional. She is honest, funny and scandalously frank."

Merritt Tierce - Dallas Morning News

"[A] field guide to both the romance and reality of what it means to create and care for other humans, delivered by narration that evinces deep sincerity and the purest happiness."

The Dallas Morning News

"[Enright’s] first work of nonfiction, Making Babies is a collection of short essays, some of them stream of consciousness, that move chronologically through the landmarks of motherhood. She writes with brutal candor and irreverence about the things that the feel-good baby books don’t tell you…."

Wall Street Journal - Moira Hodgson

"Anne Enright’s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro’s; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s."

Colm Tóibín

To write well in the mother-child arena, a person must understand that the essential condition of motherhood isn't pleasure or wonderment or even terror—although there's plenty of that. The essential condition is absurdity. Samuel Beckett could have come up with a great book on babies. Anne Enright has…in…short, lucid bursts, she conveys a delicious sense of stolen time. Bite-size chapters with titles like "Milk," "Crying" and "Burps" illuminate the darkest corners of pregnancy and early motherhood—places that are often as funny as they are hideous.
—The New York Times Book Review

Judith Newman

[Ms. Enright]'s a hopelessly vivid maker of sentences, of the sort you can't help reading aloud to whoever happens to be nearby…Part of what makes Ms. Enright so readable is that her core sweetness is lacquered over by an impacted layer of sour. She's a grown-up version of the sarcastic, complicated kid in the back corner…She has blissfully direct access to her subconscious. She says entrancingly unusual things that tend to have the density of poetry.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner

"Keenly observed and gorgeously written… one of the best books ever on the experience of being a mother. Because it’s an experience so many of us share, Enright’s fearless and funny inquiry into why motherhood feels the way it does is not only entertaining, it’s deeply consoling."

Boston Sunday Globe

"At once a memoir, a reference manual and a cautionary tale about the conflicting emotions of parenthood…. For those who’ve grown weary of hyped-up superparents and their relentless positivity, [Enright’s] candor is welcome."

More

"At once a memoir, a reference manual and a cautionary tale about the conflicting emotions of parenthood…. For those who’ve grown weary of hyped-up superparents and their relentless positivity, [Enright’s] candor is welcome."

More St.

A dryly humorous memoir/guidebook about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood by the Man Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist. Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2011, etc.) was married to her husband for nearly 20 years before they decided to have children. Having always assumed, vaguely, that she would be a mother, she first wanted to focus on her writing career. Divided into several-dozen short chapters, the book offers dispatches from the frontlines of first-time parenthood. Enright gracefully moves between straight facts, disarmingly funny admissions, her own unexpected revelations and experiences and conversational second-person directives. In "Babies: A Breeder's Guide," the author organizes the narrative into categories that include "Home Birth," "Naming," "Burps, Burp!, Burp!," "Evolution" and "How to Panic," to name a few. Throughout, Enright displays a great sense of humor, calling to mind two similarly themed memoirs: Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions (1993) and Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work (2002). Enright's conclusions are far more optimistic than Cusk's, but she shares Lamott's talent for drawing the reader fully into her writing with her frank and comic tone. She's equally honest about the difficult, boring aspects of becoming a parent, although Enright's humor works better than her seriousness. While she doesn't shy away from revealing vibrant detail the traumas and upheavals involved in pregnancy and parenthood, it's her talent for elevating otherwise menial complaints into universal truths that makes the book compelling. Fans of Enright's novels and short stories, especially parents or those contemplating parenthood, will be interested in her perspective. A winning and witty take on a well-covered topic.

Kirkus Reviews