Pregnancy Memoir

Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying "I do," she's pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months.

In this important and ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, Jones writes of the emerging concept of “matrescence”—the wholeness of becoming a mother. Drawing on her own experiences of twice becoming a mother, as well as exploring the latest research in the fields of neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology, Jones writes of the physical and emotional changes in the maternal mind, body, and spirit and shows us how these changes are far more profound, wild, and enduring than have been previously explored.

An activist calls for better support of young families so they can thrive and reflects on her experiences as a Black mother and college student fighting for opportunities for herself and her child. Pregnant Girl presents the possibility of a different future for young mothers - one of success and stability - in the midst of the dismal statistics that dominate the national conversation.

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.

When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir, Catherine reconstructs her sense of self.

Written in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Tea’s route to parenthood—with a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lover’s baby.

Whether offering insight into the rise in home births, the alarming rise in America’s maternal mortality rate, or the history of involuntary sterilization, Karkowsky offers a window into all that pregnancy, labor, and birth can entail - birth and joy, but also challenge and loss - illustrating the complexity of reproductive life and the systems that surround it. With historical insight and journalistic verve, Karkowsky unpacks what is involved for women, for a family, and for us as a society; and explores what’s at risk when these aspects of medicine remain clouded in mystery and misinformation.

The syndicated sex-advice columnist of "Savage Love" tells a no-holds-barred story of an ordinary American couple who want to have a baby, except that in this case, the couple happens to be Savage and his boyfriend.

When Chelsey Glasson landed her dream job at Google, she was thrilled to join what she viewed as a progressive and inclusive organization. But from the moment she received her job offer, she began to experience instances of discrimination and harassment—eventually culminating in a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit. Friends, family, and even lawyers told Chelsey to move on, but she knew holding Google accountable was the path to proper healing. Although Google would spend significant resources to discredit and silence her, the truth eventually prevailed.

Lisa Montgomery presented her husband, Kevin, with their newborn baby girl, while a state way, police were investigating the brutal murder of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett. She'd been found lying in a pool of blood, and investigators soon realized that someone had strangled Bobbie Jo to death, then cut the fetus from her womb. When they found Bobbie Jo's baby in Lisa's arms, they knew who was responsible for this grisly murder.

Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler running the biggest race of her life at the 2004 Olympics, she carried more than a nation's hopes - she carried her mother Catherine's dreams. In 1974, Catherine is determined and tenacious, but she's also pregnant with her second child and just scraping by in St. Lucia. When she meets a wealthy white Canadian family vacationing on the island, she knows it's her chance.

This audiobook contains everything I did in my pregnancy. From how I prevented stretch marks, to the ways I stopped my headaches without pain killers. Recipes to the nutritious meals I made.

"Into My Hands" is an intimate and inspiring memoir that delves into the life of a passionate midwife, tracing her path from childhood to her fulfilling career in midwifery. This poignant narrative was born from a transformative moment in the author's early twenties, following a traumatic birth experience with her own daughter. It was then that she resolved to put an end to birth trauma and dedicate her life to supporting women during the sacred journey of childbirth.

Twin to Twin is one 29-year-old mother's harrowing and inspiring adventure through a high-risk twin pregnancy. But this isn't only an audiobook about pregnancy. It's also an inspirational story to which all women can relate, especially when confronting any type of adversity.

Will there be light at the end of the birth canal? Does the word endometriosis make you want to stick a fork in your eye? No? Then perhaps this book isn’t for you. It’s funny, and (sometimes alarmingly) frank. It contains an impressive array of synonyms for "vagina", and it’s certainly NSFW.

Christa Parravani was 40 years old, in a troubled marriage, and in bad financial straits when she learned she was pregnant with her third child. She and her family were living in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she had taken a professorial position at the local university. Haunted by a childhood steeped in poverty and violence and by young adult years rocked by the tragic death of her identical twin sister, Christa hoped her professor’s salary and health care might set her and her young family on a safe and steady path.

Trystan and Biff had been dating for just a year when the couple learned that Biff's niece and nephew were about to be removed from their home by Child Protective Services. Immediately, Trystan and Biff took in one-year-old Hailey and three-year-old Lucas, becoming caregivers overnight to two tiny survivors of abuse and neglect. From this unexpected start, the young couple built a loving marriage and happy home - learning to parent on the job.

On the surface, Ken Baker seemed a model man. He was a nationally ranked hockey goalie; a Hollywood correspondent for People; a guest-lister at celebrity parties; and girls came on to him. Inside, though, he didn't feel like the man he was supposed to be. Although attracted to women, Ken had little sex drive and thus even less of a sex life. To his anguish, he repeatedly found himself unable to perform sexually. And, regardless of strenuous workouts, his body struggled to build muscle, earning him the nickname "Pear" from his macho teammates.

In this memoir of her 40 weeks and five days in hell, Andrea Askowitz takes an unflinching look at her pregnant life from struggling with hormones to poor body image to a self imposed exile from family to take us on a ride through the turbulence of single lesbian motherhood. Along the way we meet her liberal parents as they struggle with their daughter's choices, the lover she longs to reconnect with who goes M.I.A. before the pregnancy, the friends who turn out to be no help at all and strangers who offer up some unlikely kindness.

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to listen to something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn’t find one. So, she wrote Expecting. Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the listener on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy.