The Pregnancy Book That Made Me A Wreck Is Now A Movie
The first thing I did when I learned I was pregnant was find myself a copy of According to the book's publisher, that makes me like 90 percent of pregnant women in the country.
Soon I was a nervous wreck. According to my very informal polling, that makes me like a hefty percentage of readers of the book.
Instead of reassurance that healthy eating would mean a healthy child, "What To Expect" gave me a plan called "The Best Odds Diet" which required a spreadsheet to track daily servings of protein, fat and carbs. I quickly gave up, ate what I considered reasonably healthy food, and spent a lot of time feeling inadequate and guilty.
Instead of a practical primer of ways to keep my baby safe, there was much talk of something called
a word I have never heard before nor ever used since, but described all the ways I hadn't thought of to cause "defects or malformations."
Which is why an interview with the book's author, Heidi Murkoff in the
recently caught my eye. With
the movie about to expand the WTE media empire, reporter Eric Estrin asked Murkoff, "Have you ever given anybody bad advice?"
"I don't think so," she answered. "Well, not that I know of. Why did you just say that to me? Now I'm not gonna sleep tonight."
This can't be the first time Murkoff has faced the question of whether her advice, if not necessarily "bad," is, at least, controversial. When I mentioned on my
that I'd be writing about WTE, women chimed in to tell me about how they threw their own copies away (or, in one case, across the room) in frustration. It's written in "an insensitive and unnecessarily alarmist style," said Seema Kalia. "It made you feel like every possibility of a bad outcome was a significant possibility."
And then there was , who told me by email of how her 1991 edition still falls open to page 110, where a description of cramping and spotting in early months led her to three days of panicked crying before she could be seen by her doctor, during which she was sure she was losing the pregnancy. She wasn't.
She continues:
"Unfortunately for my OB, my Mom, my husband and every random stranger I meet for the next 7 months, I had already developed 'What To Expect When You're Expecting Syndrome' so I obsessed and worried about every food, chemical, illness or feeling that had anything to do with me and ruining my unborn baby.
According to the nine principles of healthy eating, every bite I put in my mouth was impacting my child ... and if I missed a single meal. EVEN ONE! My baby would starve to death! And who knew that I needed to look out for something called a Teratogen? When the chapter is titled "Playing Baby Roulette" what is an already edgy prego supposed to think?"
is now a parenting coach, and the author of
We spent some time on the phone last week reminiscing about our "What To Expect" freak-outs, and then we compared her older edition to the newest one. I knew the book had changed, and as we charted the parts that had been added, removed and revised, Murkoff"s protestations to the LA Times sounded more disingenuous. The book had been altered by someone who had clearly heard the criticisms that it was unnecessarily alarming.
Where earlier editions had a section in each chapter titled "What You Might Be Concerned About This Month," the latest edition now reads "What You May Be Wondering About..." The entire chapter on Teratogens is gone, and the word doesn't even appear in the index. "The Best Odds Diet" chapter has been replaced with "Nine Months of Eating Well," and the actual recipes have been moved to an entirely separate book. Everywhere words have been softened, made conditional, defanged. (There's also a far more chic pregnant woman on the cover.)
And the result? Flipping through still makes me anxious. I know Murkoff is aiming for "reassuring" -- like the good-luck pregnant-belly-pats she is said to give out in person -- but even with all the new caveats, the message is still that there is a right way and a wrong way to be pregnant, and Lord help the mother who does it all wrong.
With 40 million copies in print in 30 countries, that message has consequences.
"The original parenting paranoia feed," Kalia calls it, and I would argue it is not coincidence that it was first published in 1984, at the start of a wave of overprotective parenting.
"I guess after you've successfully saved your child from all the land mines that should have destroyed them before they were born ... how can a parent be expected to relax once that child is out in the big crazy world?" Kennedy-Kline asks.
"And for that," she adds, "we have
-- a manual for helicopter parents."
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Get top stories and blog posts emailed to me each day. Newsletters may offer personalized content or advertisements."wrecked," by charlotte roche
a review by jeanne thornton
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Charlotte Roche’s “infamous” debut novel Wetlands sounds honestly great: an extremely Aristotelian-unity-observant narrative ode to lack of personal hygiene, bodily fluids, female sexuality unchained, and anal self-impaling on a hospital bed. Sure! Sign me up for that literary movement! There are vestiges of the Charlotte Roche who could produce a plot and vision of that caliber in Wrecked. What we get this time, however, is almost an inverted vision. Before, a focus on openness and sexual liberat now, in Wrecked, essentially a portrait of a marriage between an older man and a trauma survivor in which sexual liberation and patriarchal oppression neatly coincide, kind of like peanut butter and jelly.
I think this description makes the book sound cooler than it is. I think in practice it’s kind of a mess.
The plot takes place over three days and revolves around anal parasites and psychotherapy. After a healthy twenty-page bout of sex with her husband (which I guess establishes their dynamic, and establishes that bookstore browsers will buy a copy), Elizabeth Kiehl comes to suspect that her daughter has anal parasites. After a quick “tape test” (involving pressing clear tape to the anal opening to see if any worms stick to it), she discovers that she has them too, which puts the kibosh on her and her husband’s Georg’s planned trip to a local brothel. Elizabe she always gets anxious when Georg makes her go to brothels with him to sleep with women for his pleasure. But turns out that with antibiotics, she’s only contagious for a day, which means they can just go to the brothel the next night. In between, she visits her therapist a few times and changes her will to exclude her best friend.
If you do read this book, read it for the set pieces. These are usually great. The scene where Elizabeth wipes leaking semen from her postcoital vagina with her daughter’s stuffed animal, the weirdly odor-fixated therapy conversations, the scene when Elizabeth, afflicted by horrifying anal parasites, flirtatiously offers to show them to her husband (she’s rebuffed). This last is not only a pretty legit image that says a lot about our bodies, our relationships to said bodies, and our relationships’ relationships to said bodies, but it does more than most of the rest of the book at establishing just what the dynamic between the two is.
Elizabeth’s desire for Georg isn’t dutiful or false. She waxes rhapsodic over and over about his back hair, speculates about the elevated testosterone that she has no doubt surges through him at every minute. When he demands that she masturbate for him, even though she never enjoys masturbating on her own, his eyes on her generate her desire. In almost every meaningful way, he’s the source of her sexual desires. “It’s almost as if I can get turned on only by seeing how much my body and I turn him on. I get horny only when I reflect his horniness.” Even her visits to the brothels—which often make her so anxious that she has horrible diarrhea—are exciting to her in the moment because he wants it so much, because he enjoys watching her with the prostitutes so much. She thinks she speculates about her mother and feminist activist Alice Schwarzer sitting on her shoulders during sex, judging her as she and Georg rent porn movies to watch together. Yet she enjoys it.
Is this a proud confession, or a confession that Elizabeth is actually really seriously damaged by her past experiences? The other question: would it matter either way? We can’t actuall we live with them.
Yet if the book has a major theme, it’s about the uneasy intersection where our desires meet our actual oppression. Actual oppression enters with the fact that Georg straight up controls Elizabeth financially:
“I was heavily indebted to my previous husband. The first thing my new husband did was pay off all my debts, and I’ve never been able to completely cast off the feeling that he bought me from my ex-husband like an old camel. I think it’s true, I let myself be bought . . .”
In exchange for his purchase, Georg gets everything he wants sexually, both that which Elizabeth consciously offers him and that which he takes. He refuses to consider the idea of their hiring a male prostitute
he refuses to consider the idea of her having an affair with one of their friends, which she desperately wants to do. He refuses to offer her the truth and gets away with it: when he watches all six porn DVDs she rents without her in a single day and lies about it, she ends up feeling guilty for “setting a trap” (one that involves pubic hair, because WHY NOT) to catch him at it. He’s substantially older than Elizabeth and he pays for her.
Does Elizabeth have any kind of agency or doesn’t she? Is she a helpless victim of past circumstances, or is she engaged in active resistance to conditions of oppression both by trauma and by her husband, who’s at best kind of thoughtless? The book goes out of its way not to answer that question, to a degree that I think exceeds reasonable assumption of authorial intent and veers into straight sloppiness.
A lot of the confusion here may be that either the translation is bad or the author’s own prose is bad. For example, here is a description of a shaved vulva:
“My freshly shaved lips are so soft that you can’t even compare the way they feel to anything. I can’t help fiddling with them myself after I shave—the color, that lurid pinkish purple, turns me on. Georg flips out.”
I like “Georg flips out” as an amiable piece of slummin’ it, but can there at least be an adjective other than “pinkish purple,” or some more artful way of putting the notion that all analogies are defeated by the softness of these particular freshly shaved pussy lips? Is it of any use to anyone? We also have, later, this: “Been lucky up to this point—or is it just that my husband and I just share the same taste in women? No idea. Who gives a shit?” I mean, the people who bought the book do, maybe, and given Elizabeth’s obsession with determining what breast size her husband prefers earlier in the book, clearly she does as well. Too often it’s hard to tell if we’re reading a stream of consciousness—i.e., Elizabeth’s thoughts as we move through three present tense days—or if we’re reading Elizabeth performing exegisis on her own life as it’s happening to her. I don’t think that’s desirable, just as I don’t think jamming Merzbow next to PJ Harvey on a mix tape is all that desirable. We’re either with Elizabeth or we’re speculating about her, and the result feels like a double-exposed photo. If that photo is supposed to be of a problem we’re going to examine together, why muddy it? What purpose does that serve? Too often I feel like the prose is more satisfied with itself than it is concerned with communicating something to the reader.
The result is a main character that’s not in focus enough to warrant investment in her fate. Elizabeth is a nearly total cipher. She has two knives, one for cutting garlic and one for cutting onions, so that she can tell exactly what flavors are contaminating other flavors when she prepares food, she won’t use the bathroom at her therapist’s office because she’s afraid people can smell her, and one of the book’s best set pieces is her elaborate description of her wiping her ass to avoid any contamination (balanced against a need not to waste too much toilet paper because the environment must be protected.) Then she tells us that she and her husband fight because he’s better at cleaning than she is and she’s messy, or that she’s upset that some past religious conviction prevents Georg from having unprotected sex with prostitutes. She herself has unprotected sex with prostitutes. Which is it? Does Georg get mad at her because she’s naturally messy, or does she have separate knives for cutting separate vegetables? Clearly people have contradictions in their character, but this just seems like the author’s writing two different characters, or trying to write one character and lapsing into another. It’s either the prose or it’s a character concept so subtle as to be mudd either way it doesn’t work.
There’s a second part of the book, buried within the first, that deals with the traffic accident that killed Elizabeth’s brother and maimed her mother. This part of the book is a lot better. It depicts a much more coherent Elizabeth Kiehl: one who takes the call from her father en route to her wedding, speculates about her mother’s “burned legs,” wants to murder the graphic designer who put flaming text on the newspaper headline about the accident, imagines that the lack of a body for her missing/presumed dead brother means that the missing wreck victims have cheated death and started a new life together reconstructing a private kind of civilization in the woods:
“They creep out near the autobahn at night and collect shards of broken glass from bottles thrown there . . . they polish the jagged edges down using rocks so that the pieces can be held comfortably in the hand. The noise made by rubbing the glass against stone is almost unbearable, and they laugh uneasily about it and hum loudly . . . the song they are humming is ‘Lucky Man,’ by the Verve.”
Elizabe Elizabeth counts the dead an Elizabeth negotiates the end of her relationship with her fiancé Stepan while pregnant with her daughter (who she subconsciously feels must “replace” her dead brothers.) It’s compelling, deeply felt, and interesting.
But then this Elizabeth becomes Our Elizabeth, whoever that is, and we’re asked to take a Moralizing Leap. Our Elizabeth hates smokers because she fears fire, fears getting on elevators to eleventh-floor offices, owns a dryer that she doesn’t use in order to save the planet, and apologizes to her therapist at the start of every session for being unable to control her genital odor. Our Elizabeth was attracted to Georg because he was good at solving problems, who married Georg because it was stable and safe.
Basically we’re given this syllogism: horrifying traffic accident > desire for security > give up your autonomy and take what your stable husband offers. A moralizing conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from an amoral premise like a traffic accident.
In the book’s ending (oh, hey, spoilers), Elizabeth changes her will to exclude her best friend. Georg tells her to destroy the will, to “trust him” to look after her assets and wishes after she dies (clearly he’ll outlive her, even though she’s some twenty years his junior.) Elizabeth says no. To distract him from the topic, she suggests they watch some upscale art-porn called Glory Hazel together. A friend comes to the door, and Georg allows, once he’s left, that maybe she can have an affair, but only with that particular friend. In short, Elizabeth’s desire is at last honored. Here is how this is rendered:
“Did he just give me the go-ahead? I think he did!
He did, right? Right? Right? Yes!
But for now, concentrate on Glory Hazel.
Woo hoo. Here we go!”
I refuse to believe that the author is fool enough to take her own words here at face value: I mean, she depicts Alice Schwarzer reviewing everything Elizabeth does sexually for signs of patriarchal oppressiveness. But I don’t understand what this ending means. I guess I have failed to unpack the content both manifested by and latent in “Woo hoo. Here we go!” A woman’s being given permission to follow her desires to some infinitesimal extent by the man who ultimately controls them.
Sexual liberation and fear interact to produce a self-conscious, self-aware sexual domination. Woo hoo.
This is my best guess as to what this book ultimately means (which is why, if you read it, read it for the fun body/sex scenes.) It’s also possible that it’s just a lot of gross images and an account of Elizabeth’s thoughts regarding sex, motherhood, trauma, and odor. Maybe this is preferable, because if Wrecked does have a world view, it’s a vision of sexual liberation without hope. Accept oppression for the sake of safety and the kids. This from an author who once proposed via the deep and exhaustive catalogue of bodily fluids to show us some kind of way out of our prison. I wish the author would have remained “immature” enough to present something beyond Wrecked’s stripe of nihilism.
Jeanne Thornton lives and writes in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the Lambda Award finalist novel
as well as the copublisher of the alt-comics newspaper
and the creator of the . She has an undying love for the Beach Boys and is writing her next novel about them.