Midwives

by Chris Bohjalian

I like to believe she said condoms; so many other beliefs shatter when we grow up, I want to keep this one intact.

Midwives is one of my earliest novels. It was published in March 1997. When I began the book, I hadn’t expected it would be a courtroom drama about a woman who dies in a homebirth gone tragically wrong. I had imagined a gently comic novel narrated by a midwife’s daughter about her hippie parents and her hippie parents’ friends. This short sentence gives you a sense of that. But then my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and she died six months later. And the novel took a hard turn into what has become my specialty: dread. It’s not a coincidence that the book hinges upon the death of a mother. I was grappling with that, and my books are always awash in autobiographic minutiae. It was also the first time I narrated a novel from a woman’s point of view. I began with the two sentences that open chapter one (not the prologue, which I wrote later): “I used the word vulva as child, the way some kids said butt or penis or puke. It wasn’t a swear exactly, but I knew it had an edge to it that could stop adults cold in their tracks.” Those sentences came to me when I was giving my infant daughter a bottle one dusky November afternoon, and I knew in my head that was a midwife’s daughter speaking. And so I gave myself license to fail: I would try writing across gender. If it sounded inauthentic after 50 or 60 pages, I would either try again with a male narrator or write it in the third person.

This was life force she was witnessing, the miracle that is a mother’s energy and body—a body that physically transforms itself before a person’s very eyes—and the miracle that is the baby, a soul in a physical vessel that is tiny but strong, capable of pushing itself into the world and almost instantly breathing and squirming and crying on its own.

I started researching the novel about six months after my wife’s and my daughter was born. I started writing it when she was almost a year old. When I watched my lovely bride in labor and witnessed our daughter being born, I understood – as do most parents – the majesty of what was occurring. Yes, all animals reproduce. But as I believe Thomas Moore once observed, birth is about as close as we humans come to divinity.

My mother believed a home birth was an extremely empowering and invigorating experience, and gave fragile women energy, confidence, and strength: They learned just what their bodies could do, and it gave them comfort.

One of the things I took away from my research interviews with homebirth midwives is the faith they have in mothers, and how they never lose their awe for the miracle of birth. I wanted my fictional midwife and her daughter to convey that sensibility. I think that’s why Sissy Spacek was such a perfect choice to bring midwife Sibyl Danforth to life in the movie.

For Stephen Hastings and Bill Tanner, however, for Judge Howard Dorset, this trial was merely their job. It was, in fact, just one of the many jobs they would have in their lives. One more house for a home builder. One more flight for an airline pilot. One more baby for an obstetrician or a midwife. The stakes may have been high for my family, but for the men arguing about my mother’s character and capabilities, it was just another morning out of the office, another afternoon in court.

I’ve always been fascinated by lawyers – especially trial attorneys. I spent a lot of time with two of them, a defense attorney and a prosecutor, while researching this novel. And I was struck by how, in a small state like Vermont, everyone knows everyone, and there’s a certain “across-the-aisle” camaraderie among them. For the defendant and the plaintiff, the trial is everything; for the lawyers, it might very important. . .but, in the end, they will move on to the next case and the next trial.

You can’t spend your entire life avoiding chance. It’s out there, it’s inescapable, it’s a part of the soul of the world. There are no sure things in this universe, and it’s absolutely ridiculous to try and live like there are!

When I was writing the Midwives stage play in 2019, this was among the quotes from the novel I thought about often – and how important it would be to work it into the drama. So much of the novel is a tightrope about risk and blame. But, the fact is, while sometimes there is a reason for horror and accountability makes sense. . .sometimes there just isn’t a reason and there is no one to blame.

No one said living isn’t a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.”

Alas, not. And while some of us are blessed to die in our sleep, most of us aren’t. We try to make the best choices we can, in the meantime, and do what we can to make the world a better place. This also was a quote I was excited to use in the play and see brought to life on stage.

There are expressions to convey silence; there are all the old clichés. There are the poetic constructs and affectations. A silence deep as death, a silence deep as eternity. Quiet as a lamb, a quiet wise and good. The silence of the infinite spaces, the silence upon which minds move.

John Gardner, a great teacher of writing, talked about the need, on occasion, to get jazzy with prose: to riff on a word, perhaps. This is an example of that. What does “silence” mean? How deep and profound is a particular quiet?

Those girls who became midwives, on the other hand, knew midwifery was their calling at a very early age, or—as my mother’s path suggested—had one profound, life-changing experience involving birth that pulled them in.

This came directly from my interviews with midwives. Many felt the calling at a very young age.

I once read somewhere that work takes up as much time as you can give it. If you give a job thirty minutes, for example, you’ll do it in thirty minutes. But if you can give it an hour, it’ll take an hour.

This is especially true today. When I wrote those sentences? It was 1996, and we hadn’t discovered yet the way the social networks could make us less efficient with our time. Of course, even now, I believe that old maxim: want something done? Ask a busy person.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have a new novel arriving May 10, The Lioness. Imagine – to paraphrase Jordy’s Book Club – Evelyn Hugo meets Jurassic Park (or, perhaps, The Poisonwood Bible meets And Then There Were None). It’s an historical thriller set in Hollywood and the Serengeti in 1964. A luxurious African safari turns deadly for a movie star and her entourage. You can learn lots about it on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58537058-the-lioness Or read the early reviews here: https://chrisbohjalian.com/the-lioness/ Obviously, it’s a very different book from Midwives. But my goal as a novelist is never to write the same book twice. And, still, I think readers will see that the two novels share a few of the elements that seem to mark my fiction: strong, smart, courageous women; what I hope is page-turning suspense; and, to harken back to some of the passages many of you noted above, the fact that simply being alive is a risky affair, and we make the best choices we can. Thank you, as always, for your faith in my work – and in what words and reading and books can mean to the soul.