Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence - Couverture rigide

After a lifetime of ambivalence and uncertainty about the role of the mother Rebecca Walker decided to have a baby. She had been raised by her mother, the feminist novelist Alice Walker, as a member of a watershed generation of women who are the first to believe that no job or lifestyle is unattainable. Rebecca Walker had become one of America s most acclaimed young writers while Time magazine hailed her as one of the most influential leaders under forty. Baby Love is her wise, provocative and engaging memoir of her own pregnancy and a book about motherhood for a new generation. For those under forty parenthood can be seen to be the least empowering choice in a woman s options. The promise of having it all is ambiguous about motherhood, a woman risks being emotionally drained and intellectually stunted. In caring for her baby can a mother come to lose herself? Yet motherhood is the single most meaningful experience of her life. It is a decision that led her mother to end their relationship as Rebecca set out on her own physical and emotional journey to becoming a mother. Rebecca Walker s story explores the wider sociological trends of her generation: the search for a suitable partner, bisexuality, the advances in reproductive technology and the demands of creating a family when one is a child of divorce. After nine tumultuous months Rebecca Walker became more than a mother, she also became an entirely changed person, a woman who has discovered new certainties. Giving birth to her son involved a spiritual transformation from ambivalence to unconditional love. This is an understanding and moving memoir by one of America s most important young writers about an issue every woman has to think about.

"Thoughtful." -Entertainment Weekly "A powerful new memoir...Accessible and richly textured, told with humor, wit, and warmth." -Publishers Weekly "Moving, wise, and deeply honest, Baby Love has illuminated a crucial question for our times." -Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia "Shares the earthy, spontaneous form of Anne Lamott's child-rearing classic, Operating Instructions." -The New York Times