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.