Book #38: Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly

I have been reading several baby/pregnancy books lately, but I didn't really feel like it was necessary to include What to Expect While You're Expecting or The Essential Guide to Breastfeeding in this list of books I've read. Somehow, I don't really think they count. But this book definitely counts--it's not just a list of steps on how to avoid the first-trimester nausea, but it's advice and thoughts and reflections on motherhood from the author to a younger friend throughout her friend's pregnancy. My friend Angela kindly sent me this book through the mail to California and I just got the chance to read it yesterday, and loved it.

Beth Ann Fennelly is a poet and a poetry teacher living in Mississippi, and she really is an incredible writer. She uses amazing metaphors and words sprinkled throughout the book--it just makes me happy to read really beautiful writing every once in a while. It reminded me of the reading I went to with all the MFA students at NCSU at the end of the school year: they were all so talented and so thoughtful with the individual words they used and the rhythms of the sentences they wrote out--you could really tell that everything in their poems or stories were the results of a conscious decision and not just a random choice or laziness. I'd like to be a writer like that someday, but it obviously takes a lot more work than I put into writing right now. I guess a blog is a great place to practice, so I might as well work on that right here!

Besides the writing, though, I really liked getting the perspective and the advice that Fennelly was offering to her friend. It seemed more real than what you get out of other pregnancy books, even though it was just based on her personal perspective and experience more than what doctors think. And I think that's what makes it so valuable. I want to to get more personal advice like this, from people I actually know and who care for me, like friends and family. I'd rather get advice and well-wishes and good thoughts and vibes than presents, actually. We can buy any of the baby clothes and pacifiers we need; we can't buy the experience that everyone else has that we will desperately need.