Book Review: Making Babies

I do not want to have children. Yes, yes, they’re adorable and cute and oh the most rewarding thing you’ll ever experience, but they are also exhausting and frustrating and boring a great deal of the time and you need to have a fierce love to get you through that. There is a mysticism and sentimentality around child-rearing that is most irritating, so I am always drawn to books that tear down the bullshit.

And, oh, tear down the bullshit Enright does, in her sharp and often hilarious way, although this account of pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood is also tender in places. This is a collection of essays about loving your kids, being fascinated by them, worrying about them – but also about the everyday hassles and the larger societal pressures and expectations. We still expect things from ‘mothers’ that we don’t from ‘fathers’. There’s a beautiful list of things children will eventually forgive their fathers for – but never forgive their mothers for.

‘Enjoyed’ might be a strange word to use about a book that depicts what is in many ways an alien experience to me but it’s so gorgeously written and cleverly observed that even at its bleakest – and there’s an account of a depressive breakdown in there – there are lines and phrases and thoughts to admire.