Contemporary Authors

• And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Little, Brown and Co. (New York, NY), 2018

• Powell's - http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-meaghan-oconnell-author-of-and-now-we-have-everything

  QUOTED: "It’s very personal and specific to my life, but I hope it gives women permission to feel all sorts of things about their own experiences. This was my attempt to parse all the overwhelming and confusing feelings I had during a major life transition, to explain myself to myself. It worked!"

  Q&AS
  Powell's Q&A: Meaghan O'Connell, Author of 'And Now We Have Everything'
  by Meaghan O'Connell, April 11, 2018 9:58 AM
  And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O'Connell
  Photo credit: Kelly Searle

  Describe your latest book.
  And Now We Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready is a book of interconnected essays about my experience with pregnancy and new motherhood. As Booklist put it, “This is not a book about the wonders of motherhood but about the tension between culturally inherited ideals and the realities of lived, bodily experience.” It’s very personal and specific to my life, but I hope it gives women permission to feel all sorts of things about their own experiences. This was my attempt to parse all the overwhelming and confusing feelings I had during a major life transition, to explain myself to myself. It worked!

  When did you know you were a writer?
  I was lucky, when I was younger, to have had a few teachers pull me aside or write a little note at the end of a workshop short story: “Meaghan, you’re a writer.” Was anything more thrilling to hear than that? Wasn’t that the central question? Am I? Am I? I wanted someone to declare it for me. I wanted the responsibility of that verdict to be up to other people, not me.

  But really I think it was only when I wrote, and maybe more importantly, finished the book that it stopped being this needy question. Which isn’t to say it won’t return. But at some point, deep into the writing of this book, something switched in me. It wasn’t a revelation, just a steady build. We were spending a year living in the Cayman Islands, where my husband ran an outpost of the Miami bookstore Books and Books. I would drive him to work, then my son to daycare, and then go for a walk on the beach, and then go sit in an air-conditioned coffee shop and grind away on the first draft of the book for a few hours until I had to go pick everyone up and drive us home. Grand Cayman is so small — 22 miles long, 8 miles wide — and the weather barely changes and my routine was so staid. It was the perfect place to write a book, I think. Anyway it was this feeling I had, and that I sorely miss now, driving along the left side of the road in a tiny car, careening through the roundabouts in a T-shirt and sunglasses and Birkenstocks, knowing exactly what I needed to do that day. Even when I hit a wall or was dreading getting back to the material, the book was this private, familiar beast that I visited every single afternoon. The consistency of it was so comforting, even when I was in a panic because I didn’t know where it was going or if it was adding up to anything... at least I knew what I was supposed to do that day: Open the document. Write more words. On good days, my heart would swell while I sat in traffic, squinting through the sun, knowing the book was waiting for me. I would go look at the ocean, and I would drink a LaCroix, and write all of my anxiety down in a notebook, then get back in the car, covered in sand, to go visit the Word document.

  Just knowing that that’s what it takes to write a book: sitting down and working on it day after day after day, consistently, even when you don’t want to… Well I know I did it once and can do it again. Which means I no longer need anyone else to tell me I’m a writer.

  What does your writing workspace look like?
  I am answering these questions from my first-ever home office. It is a small 7x7 room in our house, with a big window, and a daybed, and an Ikea desk tailored to my height (I am 4'11"). On my desk there are lots of books and bills and a SAD lamp (Portland!). I love this room a lot. My son calls it “the workroom.” Unfortunately, in three months my Ikea desk will be supplanted by an Ikea crib and said workroom will become a nursery. It’s a positive development, but the metaphor is a little too on the nose.
  .
  What's the strangest job you've ever had?
  As an undergrad I worked at the university’s dining hall. Trays full of discarded food would pass by us on a conveyor belt, and my job was to scoop the food off the plates into a trough of running water. We listened to music and laughed and flirted with the managers, so it wasn’t so bad, despite the disposable gloves they made us wear, which were always too big for my tiny, sweaty hands and so would slide around and threaten to fall off. Sometimes I just said screw it and wiped off other peoples’ dirty plates with my bare hands. I think about this job every time I see a dirty plate covered in ketchup.

  Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
  Once my husband and I went on a New England bookstore road trip, which is its own sort of pilgrimage. According to my email archives, we went to 17 stores in four days. We drove through Connecticut, then Boston, Providence, and up along the coast of Maine. I was 30 weeks pregnant, so we bought a lot of children’s books and made a lot of pit stops. My “visual aid” to calm myself down in labor ended up being borrowed from an afternoon in Maine: me, sitting in a one-person booth (ALONE), looking out the window at the ocean, eating a giant crab roll. This was no help in labor, and sort of beside the point, but now I really want a crab roll.

  What scares you the most as a writer?
  Ha! What a cruel question. That I will inadvertently reveal myself to be a monster. But not in a self-aware way.

  Offer a favorite passage from another writer.
  I think about this section of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath every time I start to second-guess the fact that we pay $1000/month on childcare so that I can sit at this little desk and write, so that I can earn what, some months, amounts to less than preschool tuition. Of course, there are fat months and lean months and usually all it takes is a buoying pep talk from another working mother or a good spate of school holidays to remind me why this is the absurd way we’ve chosen to live our lives. Year after year she’ll do it…

  A man commits no particular heresy against his sex by being a good father, and working is part of what a good father does. The working mother, on the other hand, is traducing her role in the founding myths of civilization on a daily basis — no wonder she’s a little harassed. She’s trying to defy her own deep-seated relationship with gravity. I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to Earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism: her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she’ll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn’t come then down she’ll go.

  Describe a recurring or particularly memorable dream.
  In my book I describe a recurrent pregnancy dream, which haunts me to this day. In all of them, my “baby” shrinks into nothing, or goes missing, or I sit on it (shout-out to that Denis Johnson short story where he sits on a baby bunny (?) in a truck), or I EAT IT ACCIDENTALLY.

  Also, once a long time ago, I had a dream that I smoked a cigarette through my nipple. My boob smoked a cigarette. It’s a pretty compelling visual, I have to say.

  Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
  After we turn out the lights and my husband falls asleep, I often lie in the dark reading parenting forums. The darker or more unhinged the better. I like to tell myself I do it because I am "essentially curious about human nature” or some shit, but in reality I am just anxious and bored.

  Top Five Books I Read To Soothe Myself When I Am Paralyzed By Writing Anxiety:
  The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
  When it comes to style, and when it comes to heart, Paley is the master. And it is always soothing to be in the presence of mastery.

  I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron
  Ephron is the queen of voice — intimate, confident, funny, knowing. Reading her always brings me back to myself.

  The Vermont Plays by Annie Baker
  Annie Baker is a genius, and while I’ve yet to see one of her plays performed, they are so, so fun to read. They’re super weird, hilarious, dark, and shot through with meaning. I always read them before bed when I’ve had a really bad day and need to stop staring at my phone.

  The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
  I wrote about this book for The Cut back in the day and stand by it. I am like that annoying friend who is always telling everyone they should go to therapy, except it’s The Artist’s Way (okay, also therapy!!!). There is a lot of eye-roll-inducing stuff you can skim over, but the heart of it is so useful and revelatory. It is, as a relevant aside, the perfect book for new parents who are coming back to their work and trying to feel like themselves again.

  Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
  Some of my writer friends have stubbornly refused to do The Artist’s Way, which is fine, totally fine, no skin off my teeth (me in my head: “Okay I trust they will do it eventually, when they’re ready.”) When I hit a wall with that book (okay it’s a whole PROGRAM), I say, "At least reread Bird by Bird." And they’re like, "Meaghan, I’ve never read that book." And I gasp. Resist all you want but then go read “Shitty First Drafts” and tell me you don’t feel better.
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Meaghan O'Connell's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Longreads, and The Billfold, where she was an editor. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband and young son. And Now We Have Everything is her first book.

• Meaghan O'Connell Home Page - http://www.meaghano.com/about/

  HI. I'm Meaghan O'Connell. I live with my family in Portland, OR. My first book, And Now We Have Everything, is out now from Little, Brown.

  I'm also a freelance writer. You can find most of my recent work at Longreads and New York Magazine's The Cut. From 2013-2015 I co-edited the personal finance website The Billfold, and before that worked in the tech industry.

  You can follow me on Twitter here, or subscribe to my tinyletter.

  Contact info:

  oconnell.meaghan @ gmail dot com

  my agent is Sarah Smith, ssmith@dblackagency dot com.

  for book-related stuff, my publicist at Little, Brown is Lena Little, lena.little@hbgusa dot com

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2018/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-meaghan-oconnell/

  QUOTED: "Sometimes I worry that people will see my book as trying to titillate or scare people, thinking that moms love to talk about their bad birth stories to look impressive. But the way I approached this book was, if I could truly get to the bottom of all this or say things that I was afraid to think, if I could just excavate all that, it’s never going to be as bad as I was afraid it’s going to be. Maybe there’s something soothing about that: This is just as bad as it was."

  IT’S JUST REALITY: TALKING WITH MEAGHAN O’CONNELL
  BY JAIME GREEN
  May 2nd, 2018
  Four years ago, Meaghan O’Connell had a baby. A few months later, she wrote the nearly 15,000-word story of that birth, sent in installments to friends—and eventually strangers—who subscribed to her Tinyletter. I didn’t know O’Connell, but we had friends in common on Twitter, and I remember something like a buzz of whispers sweeping through my feed, the circles of online friends that overlapped with hers, before I could track down the link to subscribe. I read the four installments in a rush, in one go.

  Two epidurals in, O’Connell writes:

  I wanted the C-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house, but you still feel like you should demur. I wanted it the way I wanted someone to stick a finger in my butt during sex, but would never ask for. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I’ve ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.

  The birth story was later published by Longreads. I couldn’t look away. I cried. I considered maybe never having children. I loved it.

  Four years later, that birth story is the centerpiece of O’Connell’s book, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready, which covers her pregnancy—a surprise, soon fervently clung to—and harrowing first year-and-change of motherhood. Not harrowing for any crisis or emergency, beyond the crisis and emergency of new motherhood, which, in O’Connell’s telling, are less a flash point and more a steady beating. And yet the book heals the fears that I built out of the birth story—this isn’t a cautionary tale but a true story, full of pain and hard work and self-reflection and love.

  I talked to O’Connell about perfectionism in motherhood and writing, the fear of death, and what it feels like to be pregnant again as this book is coming out.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Have you been doing a lot of interviews already for the book?

  Meaghan O’Connell: I did one for a parenting site that I know is very pro–attachment parenting. I think I said some things their audience might not love. I was like, Well, I’m not deft enough at being interviewed to step around this without saying my spiel.

  Rumpus: I assume your spiel is not pro–attachment parenting.

  O’Connell: Before I got pregnant and when I was pregnant, I really wanted to do all those things because in the absence of knowing what it would be like, and what I would be like as a mother, I was just like, I want to do the very best thing, and attachment parenting, or doing all the things that are labor-intensive—co-sleeping and breastfeeding all the time—well, that takes the most work. So that must be the best. Like if I sacrifice as much as I can and try to do the best thing for the baby at all times, then maybe that means I’ll be doing it right. I was really concerned with doing the right thing, and I didn’t really take into account how it would feel for me. That reckoning is obviously an ongoing thing, but [the question now] is just, what can I handle? What makes the family happy, versus what does the kid want at all times. I’m not against attachment parenting, it’s just that my personality has to be accounted for, and my sanity.

  Rumpus: It sounds like you were going into it for overachiever, perfectionist reasons. Which, as a fellow sufferer, I know is almost never a beneficial reason to do something.

  O’Connell: I went into it with the same framework that I’d go into anything with—just read a bunch of books and try to be the best, and anxiously focus on that. I didn’t know what I wanted because I’d never done this before. And it was so overwhelming. I was young enough where I didn’t know myself well enough to not have it be this aspirational thing. I imagined that I would have the baby and become this selfless person, and that I would be as happy as all the women whose blogs I read.

  I’m pregnant again and about to have a baby, and the approach is so different. I was worrying about giving birth again and worrying about postpartum, and it’s like, Okay, here are the limitations of my personality or of my self, and here’s what’s going to come up and here’s what I’m worried about, instead of, These are my goals for the baby. Like, I know I have a tendency towards anxiety and depression, so what can I do to make sure that somebody is checking in on me. Or how can we make sure that we get sleep—feed the baby in shifts, and if I need to supplement with formula, I need to clarify to myself now that it’s fine. It’s working with yourself instead of trying to become someone else. It’s very liberating. And I’m excited now, while I was more anxious the first time.

  It’s like how we think about writing or work. You can set these lofty goals, like I’m going to wake up first thing in the morning, I’m going to write a thousand words then I’m going to go to yoga and I’m going to make a green smoothie or whatever. Or it can be about knowing your own habits and tendencies: Well, if I go for a walk first, maybe that’s better, cause I’ll avoid staring at the Internet. You’re just taking into account what kind of person you are, your habits and how you can work around them, and you’ll get work done.

  Rumpus: It sounds like you had to work through your perfectionism with writing the same way as with being a mother.

  O’Connell: It’s amazing that I wrote a book, and it’s amazing that I raised a child. I don’t care anymore if it’s the best thing. I know how hard it was to do both of those things. When you’re writing a book, you’re so afraid of failure. Any imperfection is terrifying. And then the book isn’t the perfect thing that you imagined in your head ahead of time, and there’s a reckoning with that—it’s humiliating, in a way. But I’m just a normal person, and if I have to finish this book, it’s not going to be what I dreamed. You have to accept that, and it’s great to get over that fear. I think it was similar with having a baby. If I’m not perfectly happy all the time, then it’s just reality. And I have to face the fact that I’m a person who is imperfect. And then that opens doors to all the other anxieties, like well if I’m not perfect then what kind of monster am I?

  Rumpus: Like those are the only options—either I’m perfect or a monster. It reminds me of the idea of the “good enough mother,” which I really like because it’s like, you don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be good enough that your kid doesn’t die.

  O’Connell: And that alone is kind of a huge ask.

  Rumpus: Yeah, it’s not the lazy way out. And in writing—have you read Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert’s book? One of the most resonant parts for me was a chapter about just being good enough. Like, at some point you have accept that your writing doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough for you to be done with it.

  O’Connell: I read that book as I was doing the last revision on my book, and it was extremely soothing to me. You have this sense that if you just keep working on it and keep working on it, then you won’t be vulnerable any more. Like if it’s good enough or if it’s perfect, then I’m perfect and then I don’t have to be a person that could be hurt or die.

  Rumpus: And if you’re a perfect mother your child will never feel pain or suffer—

  O’Connell: Or die. But they will! It’s already a foregone conclusion, but you spend all this time frantically trying to distract yourself from that. Being so aware of that isn’t something I recommend, but it did make me not care about a lot of other things. Like, I don’t care if I feed my kid from a pouch or whatever. I know what I’m really worried about is him dying. That’s the underlying anxiety of all these debates over stupid shit like that.

  Rumpus: You went through your first pregnancy very anxious and concerned with being perfect, but now you’ve gotten to this point where you see things very differently. Was writing about it part of what got you to this new way of looking that things?

  O’Connell: I think I would’ve gotten there just through living and talking to other moms, but writing the book, I located a lot of the anxiety, or the gap between expectations and reality. You’re not supposed to say that writing is catharsis or is therapeutic, but it was for me. I started with the birth story—I went through this thing and I couldn’t explain it. All I could think whenever anybody asked me about it was “BAD;” it was too much to even process. I wanted to tell my friends about it but I didn’t know where to start and how to talk about it. So writing it out is how I explained it to myself. The whole book came from there.

  Rumpus: Let’s talk about the Tinyletter origin of the book. You’d been through a pretty traumatic birth experience, and you wanted to process it for yourself and communicate that experience to your friends, so writing about it became the way to do both of those things. How did that end up as a Tinyletter?

  O’Connell: [My friends and I] would joke on Twitter about birth stories, and if a mommy blogger had a baby and hadn’t blogged her birth story, you’d be like, Where is it? Your baby’s a month old! Give us the goods! Sort of semi-ironically obsessed.

  Rumpus: You and your friends didn’t have kids—where did that obsession with mommy blogs come from?

  O’Connell: I think partly it was a fascination with women whose lives were so completely different from our own. While we were trying to figure out what we wanted from our lives, and trying to reinvent the wheel in a way, they had committed to something. Their lives may have seemed small, but they had a focus and a clarity that was appealing. They made it seem so straightforward. Have babies, have an aesthetically pleasing home and wardrobe, take photos of all of it and share your optimistic musings on all of it. I think it felt sort of forbidden. This whole universe that didn’t apply to us. But it was fun as a thought exercise, to sit there reading these elaborate posts about cloth diapering, imagining that of course you’d do it, too, someday.

  And of course the birth stories were always the highlight. You can be a terrible writer with no self-awareness and write a birth story I would love to read, because I think they are inherently gripping. The plot is built in—there’s a set cast of characters (though if things go as planned, a new one in the end), a clear conflict (how to get the baby out), high stakes (life itself!). Everyone leaves changed.

  So when I had a baby some of my friends were like, Okay, come on. Write us your birth story. I thought, Oh shit, okay. I didn’t know if I was going to email it to a few friends or what, but writing it was like stealing time away. The baby was three months old and we didn’t have any daycare yet, so I would go to a coffee shop and try to get a little bit of work done and then spend an hour working on this thing, and it was the best writing experience of my life. I was so, I don’t know, exultant working on this. It became this huge document and I knew it was good. It was like real writing to me. But I didn’t know what to do with it, because it was so fresh and personal and vulnerable. I didn’t really want to put it on the Internet where people could comment on it. I had no idea what the reaction would be, or who would publish a birth story. It was a different time on the Internet. I was like, Do I want to get paid for this? Is that weird? Did I want to work with an editor on it? Not really. I couldn’t imagine who I would trust, or what kind of headline or artwork they would give it. People were starting to do Tinyletters, so I figured, okay, I’ll put it in there. Something about the Tinyletter—you would only read it if you asked for it. And then putting it out into the world was this incredible experience that—I don’t know how to talk about in a non-corny way.

  Rumpus: Talk about it in a corny way.

  O’Connell: Just to have someone, even a stranger, say, This is crazy, it’s like, Thank god I’m not crazy in thinking that this was like hell. People read it that I wouldn’t have thought would care about childbirth. And I just felt so seen. The experience of the actual birth was so much about feeling alone and feeling like I couldn’t communicate how much pain I was in or how horrible I felt. And so to be able to do it through writing was honestly a fantasy. It was a healing thing. Which, again, is not what you’re supposed to say writing is for, but it was cool.

  Rumpus: How did you realize that you had a whole book in you about this?

  O’Connell: It wasn’t until I wrote the birth story. I was bursting with things to say, and I didn’t have enough time to be writing. For the first time in my life I wanted to write all the time, instead of avoiding it and procrastinating. Before I had the baby I thought I wouldn’t write about this. I thought, This is going to be my separate life, and I’m going to be an “intellectual” and keep this domestic crap at home. But then I couldn’t second-guess, because this was the sort of feeling I’d been wanting to have with writing forever, the feeling of having something to say and wanting to say it and not questioning myself and enjoying writing it.

  Rumpus: The idea that writing about pregnancy and motherhood isn’t intellectual is obviously a misogynist stereotype that we’ve internalized—how do you feel about that distinction, or those labels?

  O’Connell: When I started writing about it, I had so little time and so much I wanted to say, so I just tried not to second-guess myself and worry: Is this cool? What will people think? Will I be pigeonholed? Instead I wanted to challenge myself to write about this in a way that’s appealing to people that aren’t parents yet. At the time, it was my impression that writing about this stuff was in its own world, siloed on parenting websites. At the same time, The Argonauts came out in 2015, a year after I had my kid. On Immunity was coming out around that time, and Dept. of Speculation—I was pregnant when that book came out. I remember my friend saying, “Don’t read this.” So of course I read it. And so I was slowly finding all these books. I remember, for Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill did an interview and said, “This book by Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work, is like a secret handshake among new mothers.” Everyone’s insisting that this is a magical time and they’ve never been happier, but then there’s the bad moms off to the side trading this book. I wanted the existential dark stuff, which was the opposite of what I’d been consuming beforehand.

  Sometimes I worry that people will see my book as trying to titillate or scare people, thinking that moms love to talk about their bad birth stories to look impressive. But the way I approached this book was, if I could truly get to the bottom of all this or say things that I was afraid to think, if I could just excavate all that, it’s never going to be as bad as I was afraid it’s going to be. Maybe there’s something soothing about that: This is just as bad as it was. People can be coy about [parenting] like, It’s hell! Ha ha ha! Something about that is more sinister than saying, “Let me tell you how afraid I was of my baby dying.” At least it’s just true.

  Rumpus: Being pregnant now, what’s it like talking about and revisiting all this material while you’re sort of living the book’s epilogue?

  O’Connell: It’s pretty intense. I went back to my therapist because I need to have some sort of mental health situation set up, because I don’t want to go through that again. I hadn’t seen her in a year or two. So she said, “Remind me again what your birth was like.”

  Rumpus: Oh god.

  O’Connell: I was like, Fuck. I started telling her the story and she’s asking really useful, probing therapy questions to clarify things, and within a minute I’m sobbing. This is still very real and very present in my brain. And it’s not necessarily something that will be resolved. But it’s worth it. Once my kid was one, and then two and three—he’s almost four now—every year I like parenting so much more. Worst-case scenario, I have another year of hell ahead of me. That’s not how I approached it the first time. Every day I was miserable with a baby, asking “What have I done to my life? I ruined my life, this is my life from now on—for the next twenty years.” But having a newborn is nothing like having a four-year-old. Thank god. Now I’m excited because I can conceptualize, like, this is a person. And we’re going to meet him and he’ll be this tiny baby and we’re going to be exhausted, and I might be hormonally miserable or just totally out of it. But I’m hoping that I’ll be able to have that perspective that it’s just a temporary misery. Now, we sit around the kitchen table and he asks me who made the solar system. And that’s amazing.

  ***

  Author photograph © Kelly Searle.

• Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/meaghan-oconnell-thinks-motherhood-is-what-keeps-women-oppressed-a3e761a895ec

  QUOTED: "There’s a chapter about how after I gave birth, I was with my friends and I wanted to tell them everything and didn’t know how to articulate it, or it didn’t make sense to me yet — that was my motivation when I first started writing the book. I didn’t really feel like a mom yet when I started writing and I was trying to talk to friends that didn’t have kids, so it was very much written in the spirit of 'Can you guys believe this shit?'"
  "I always hated when people were like: 'You can’t understand until you do it.' I thought, if I want to call myself a writer I should be able to write about this in a way that is not alienating."

  Meaghan O’Connell Thinks Motherhood Is What Keeps Women Oppressed
  Her memoir ‘And Now We Have Everything’ doesn’t mince words about the costs that accompany the joys of becoming a mom

  Photo by Mon Petit Chou Photography on Unsplash

  A few years ago, I tweeted something along the lines of: “I wonder if my memories of my twenties will just be images of wondering if I’m pregnant in different locations.” I convince myself that I’m pregnant at least every other month. This state of anxiety and wonder — one that is familiar to many women — is where we meet Meaghan O’Connell at the beginning of her memoir And Now We Have Everything. She’s in her late twenties with an overdue period, sore breasts, and a feeling that something is different.

  Purchase the novel.
  And in O’Connell’s case, it was: the missed period was not a false alarm. She was pregnant, and decided with her fiancé to keep the baby. The subtitle of the book is “On Motherhood Before I was Ready,” and this is the journey O’Connell retraces for us, one of uncertainty and second guessing. But she tells her story with candor, humor, and introspection. Some narratives of pregnancy and motherhood create an “us versus them” dynamic between parents and the childless, which means readers without children can feel shut out. But O’Connell’s work does the opposite: she invites you to experience with her the life of a woman unexpectedly carrying a child.
  Ahead of the book’s April release, O’Connell and I spoke about the lineage of the motherhood narrative, the literary moment it’s having right now, and striking the balance between singularity and universality in these stories.

  Rebecca Schuh: I’ve found that many books about motherhood establish a distance between parents and non-parents, but And Now We Have Everything avoided that. I don’t have any children, but I felt very included in the narrative. Was that intentional on your part?
  Meaghan O’Connell: Yes, totally. There’s a chapter about how after I gave birth, I was with my friends and I wanted to tell them everything and didn’t know how to articulate it, or it didn’t make sense to me yet — that was my motivation when I first started writing the book. I didn’t really feel like a mom yet when I started writing and I was trying to talk to friends that didn’t have kids, so it was very much written in the spirit of “Can you guys believe this shit?” I always hated when people were like “You can’t understand until you do it.” I thought, if I want to call myself a writer I should be able to write about this in a way that is not alienating.

  RS: You talk about once you realized you were pregnant, reading mommy blogs and finding solace in women who were forthcoming about their desires for children, versus pretending to not care about it. It seemed like you were in this gray area between, I’m 100% sure and I don’t care at all. Can you speak to the process of figuring out how much you did care, and realizing for yourself where you fell on the spectrum?
  MO: Have you read Sheila Heti’s book yet?
  RS: It’s literally on my nightstand! I’m looking at it right now.
  MO: It’s so good, and completely about this. I’ve been talking to her, and it’s interesting because when I got pregnant I was 29, so having a baby was still this far-off thing. It was almost safe enough to fantasize about in an unrealistic way. “I just want a baby because I would look cute in a maternity dress and buy cute baby clothes.” If I hadn’t actually ended up having a baby, maybe I would be 33 and not sure whether I wanted to have a kid at all. I didn’t get the chance to have the real reckoning, I just did it. It was still this thing that older people did, slash a fantasy.
  Paula Whyman on Motherhood, Linked Stories & The Inherent Humor of Sex Scenes

  Michele Filgate Talks with the Author of You May See a Stranger
  electricliterature.com
  RS: When you were in say, your early twenties or even teens, was it always that “maybe someday” type of feeling?
  MO: I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to have kids and she was like, “You would never do that to me and your father!” It was when I met Dustin, my husband, and started to have domestic fantasies with him that I just had this urge to get pregnant. I think it was more of a biological thing than a rational thing.
  RS: It’s funny you bring up the Sheila Heti book, because there are a bunch of other books this year that are delving into the topic of motherhood in really interesting ways. Have you read any others that are coming out now?
  MO: When I started writing this book, it was 2014 and The Argonauts wasn’t out yet, Dept of Speculation was just coming out, and After Birth…I’m wondering if this is the wave from people who read those books.
  RS: Oh that’s so interesting! I remember that year, I loved all those books, and The Folded Clock. It’s a very rich lineage. I hadn’t thought about that before. There is a clear through-line.
  MO: Have you heard of this book The Motherhood Affidavits that’s coming out? It’s by Laura Jean Baker, but it’s fascinating and so different from my book because she’s like addicted to having babies. I guess she struggled with depression her whole adult life and the hormones from breastfeeding made her feel so happy and content for the first time ever, so she had five kids.
  I had sort of the opposite chemical reaction! Let’s see, there’s Now My Heart is Full by Laura June, which is captivating because her relationship with her mother, and how their relationship comes back when she has her daughter, is a big part of the book. It’s also fascinating to me because I guess she was more of an adult when she had Zelda, she deals with some of the things that I could not cope with, in such a matter of fact way. “I was exhausted and going crazy so I sleep trained the baby and everything was okay!” It’s a different personality.
  What is the meaning behind all this? How is this going to turn out to be worth the mind-fuck?
  RS: That’s a big part of why these stories are so compelling. Artists and creative personalities are already so different and unique and strong but then seeing how that mindset is applied to the very fundamental process of creating a person.
  In terms of the structure, your book has different sections, and they have several different kinds of narrative formats. From a craft standpoint, how did those come about?
  MO: It’s so nice to get a question about this! Structurally the challenge of the book was that I wanted them all to be essays in and of themselves, but to still have a narrative momentum throughout. So they weren’t quite chronological but roughly they are. I wanted to tell a story but also have it be a book of distinct ideas.
  I struggled a lot with how to end the book. I think the first draft I sent to my editor ended with an essay about daycare. And I liked the idea of it, at least, the happy ending of the book that my child goes to daycare. But I don’t know, it wasn’t quite satisfying enough. And I was living the story as I was writing the book, so I didn’t know what the conclusion was going to be. I had wanted a grand conclusion, but what I ended up trying to get at was that in the end, time just passes. The through-line of the book is trying to figure out, what is the meaning behind all this? How is this all going to turn out to be worth the mind-fuck? And in the end, there’s no big revelation, it’s more like, things were hard. And now they’re not so hard. And that’s how it is. But that’s not really the story we tell about having a baby or being a parent.
  The Doppelgängers

  by Helen Phillips, recommended by Lauren Groff
  electricliterature.com
  RS: There’s that passage where you were talking about how it’s kind of like a career where you’re paying your dues in the beginning…
  MO: I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone, but I think probably a lot of people. But then you forget, and you miss your child as a baby so you just remember the good parts. I don’t think everyone is colluding to lie, to make people have babies and ruin their lives too. But I really thought, from what I read, or heard from people, that it was going to be magical and this crazy existential profundity. And I guess there was some of that, but it just seems really weird to me that that’s what the takeaway is! Maybe that was my own self-delusion.
  I think if men gave birth there would be a grand literature of birth stories.
  RS: There were strains of commentary throughout the book on the fucked up capitalism of motherhood. There’s a line: “I should have known to be suspicious of the supposed inherent reward of unpaid labor that can be carried out exclusively by the female body.” Can you talk a little more about that?
  MO: It was so stark to me, honestly. I was a gender studies major, I was a feminist in high school, I wasn’t one of those people who was thirty-five and hadn’t considered myself a feminist. But I really found myself breastfeeding all the time and thinking, this is why women are oppressed. I figured it out, in this visceral way that was undeniable to me, and an inconvenient reality. You can’t be stuck on a couch feeding your baby around the clock and not thinking about this. I mean, I guess people do. I just remembered this, I was running around the track, my boobs were full of milk, and and I knew I had to be home soon, and I was like, this is it, this is the core of all of it. If women didn’t give birth, we would probably be equal.
  I remember writing Emily Gould an email about this, and she was like, “You need to read Shulamith Firestone,” who argues that babies should be gestated in vats, and that will be the liberation of women. I don’t think that, I’m getting into dangerous territory here, but it was a definite realization, and I knew it intellectually. Until Dustin and I had the baby we were like, someone has to be watching this child at all times, and we are responsible for him and we have to pay a lot of money to be away from him. This comes down to math — how much daycare in Brooklyn costs and how much I can earn while he’s away from me. That system was built for one parent, aka the woman, to stay home. This is what capitalism is built around.
  I found myself breastfeeding all the time and thinking, this is why women are oppressed.
  RS: When you write about the labor experience, I was amazed that you were able to write it so minute by minute, and very viscerally. I was very impressed that you remembered it so specifically, that you were re-inhabiting that mental state.
  MO: I wrote it very soon postpartum. I remember it was Labor Day weekend, and I had the baby in June, so it was three months post-partum. I was still in that manic, crazy state of sleep deprivation. That’s the one chapter or essay that hasn’t really changed much since I wrote it the first time. Obviously it’s been edited but there’s no way I could have written that now, or a year ago. It’s visceral because I wrote it when it still was.
  RS: You have a passage: “I would save the world except I wasn’t. I was doing the most banal thing in the world. I was giving fucking birth.” I thought that spoke so well to this grand contradiction of how each individual birth is so singular, and society does hold it up to this crazy ideal, but it’s also, you know, something most animals eventually do.
  MO: People are dismissive of writing about motherhood or birth stories, it becomes this blogger thing and not literature. But I always tell myself, dying is very universal, too. It’s common, but we don’t say, “Get over it, we all die, shut up, we don’t need to read about this.” I think if men gave birth there would be a grand literature of birth stories.
  It’s a contradiction, it’s the craziest day in my life, or the worst day of my life, but there’s fifty other women on the same floor giving birth that day.
  5 Essential Short Reads for the New Parent

  The short stories that helped author Melissa Yancy through the parental fog
  electricliterature.com
  RS: I’m reading Leslie Jamison’s new book on alcoholism and recovery, and she talks a lot about how the commonality between stories is more important than the uniqueness of any story. And how that was hard for her as a writer, because you’re like “I want to be the unique one.”
  MO: She writes so well about that, about the cliché and embracing it in a way, and undercutting it.
  RS: There’s a similarity between her book and the motherhood narrative. She says several times in the book, “I would tell people that I was writing a book about addiction and they were like, ‘oh just another addiction memoir.’” It’s strange that’s even become a stereotype — in the right hands either of these stories are so individually fascinating.
  MO: Reading her book, that self-doubt, that sort of meta, underlying question of, “is this story worthwhile?” or, “how do I do this in a way that justifies its existence?” In a way it’s just a mental trap. Internalized misogyny, at least with motherhood stuff.
  RS: Internalized art misogyny, wherein women start questioning themselves on what topics are worthy of the canon.
  Once you’re back home with the baby, you have this line: “I was not just trapped in an apartment with my tits out, I was trapped in love with him. I could never go back to before.” Is there still that strict line between the eras of your life?
  MO: It was so stark then. It was suffocating. There was no way out, “I am trapped, this is irrevocable.” It doesn’t feel like that anymore! Now my life is like, I take my kid to daycare at 8:30 and he comes home at 5 with his dad. I have those hours in the day to do my work and be a person, which is logistically completely different. But it’s weird to think about before, when I was a person that was 28 and lived in Brooklyn and had freedom. It’s not like you can be continuously aware that you are free and can do whatever you want. I mean you can try! But I think I wrote something about how we spent the night in a hotel one night and I was like “wow I had a baby just to feel this free away from him?” I can appreciate it now in a way I wasn’t able to then.
  It is strange because I’ll show my son pictures of me and Dustin before he was born, and he’ll say “Where was I?” And I think, god that is weird, that you didn’t exist yet.

• Millions - https://themillions.com/2018/05/mom-rage-an-interview-with-meaghan-oconnell.html

  Uncomfortable Territory: The Millions Interviews Meaghan O’Connell
  THE MILLIONS INTERVIEW Edan Lepucki May 30, 2018 | 14 books mentioned 8 min read
  Related Books:

  When my friend Amelia Morris and I decided to start a podcast about motherhood called Mom Rage, my first thought was, “We need to get Meaghan O’Connell on the show!”

  O’Connell’s first book, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready, recounts her accidental pregnancy at age 29, her harrowing birth story, and the angst and anxieties of early motherhood. She writes honestly and with humor about looking at her own body in the mirror soon after returning from the hospital, about her complicated feelings surrounding breastfeeding, and about the time she fled a library story time, unable to connect with the other moms. When she writes, “I couldn’t figure out whether motherhood was showing me how strong I was or how weak. And which one was preferable,” I nod with recognition, and I cheer when she writes, “What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?” Meaghan is a brilliant writer. I am so glad she became a mother so that she can convey on the page all the muck of parenting that seems—while it’s actually happening to me—impossible to convey.

  As hosts of Mom Rage, Amelia and I start every show sharing our own struggles and frustrations as parents, and we investigate the unfair expectations and assumptions placed on mothers. We then interview a guest: authors, healthcare professionals, and regular parents just trying their best. Meaghan fulfills two of those three categories. We talk to her in episode 4.

  After our podcast conversation, which focused on parenting and her expectations for her soon-to-be-born second child, I sent Meaghan some questions via email. These were about the craft of writing a book like hers; they were my way of asking, “How did this masterpiece come to be?” She was kind enough to shed some light on her process.

  The Millions: You were penning regular columns on parenting for The Cut before your memoir came out. Were you writing the memoir alongside these essays? I’m curious how the shorter work informed the book, and how writing about parenting related to parenting itself. More to the point: How does writing help you process motherhood?

  Meaghan O’Connell: I was. The book came out of the regular freelance writing I was doing and then became its own, separate thing. I would have loved to only write the book but couldn’t afford to do that. So it was a year or two or three of being completely immersed in this subject, for better or worse. At the beginning it was where my brain was anyway, so it was very convenient in a sense. Like being paid to think about what I was already thinking about in the first place.

  Web writing became a sort of farm team for my brain. Some of it ended up being adapted into the book; some just led to deeper thinking; some was about getting things out of my system. It was also nice to publish little things along the way, proof of life, getting to feel like I was part of the conversation, etc.

  I thought writing a book would be so much more overwhelming than writing a column, but I was surprised by how much safer it felt. Just spending the time on it, in what felt like a secret document. And then the year of editing that went into it! It is overall much less terrifying than writing 1,000 words in two to three days and then seeing it online with a comments section under it. That is a different kind of fun!

  Writing helps me process everything. There is a sweet spot for me with essays where I know I have a lot of ideas about something, but they’re only 60-80 percent formed, and getting to that last 20 percent can happen in the writing. Or maybe it’s just 10 percent more and you leave the rest open because certainty is a lie. That’s what’s been funny about doing interviews. If I could easily talk about this stuff in a way that is neat or cogent, I would not have needed to write a book about it.

  TM: What was your process for putting this memoir together? Was each chapter considered a discrete section, planned ahead of time as a separate essay, or was it all in your head as an overall arc?

  MO: Well, I will start by saying I never thought of it as a memoir! It’s certainly autobiography, and I wouldn’t argue it’s not a memoir, but the m-word has really only come up now that the book is out.

  In the writing (and selling) of the book, it was always “essays.” Granted, some chapters (technically the word “chapter” is not in the book either! But I keep falling back to it, so maybe that is a tell) are more essayistic than others, meaning there is more of an attempt to figure something out, with a central question or a central idea, and others are more story-ish.

  So to answer your question, there wasn’t an arc. I thought of the book as a series of distinct essays around different ideas or experiences: pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, sex, gender roles, etc. The list was always changing, and it was never as neat as that. But still.

  The structural challenge all along, though, was that the birth is a natural climax. But it couldn’t be at the end. I had a few talks with editors about putting it at the beginning. It wasn’t supposed to matter whether it was chronological. Part of me wanted everything out of order.

  But then you write all these words, and I really wanted it to feel like a cohesive BOOK, not just a bunch of essays “packaged” as a book as a career move (you know the sort of book I mean). I wanted it to be its own world. I wanted it to be propulsive. Or I was afraid to want this and resisted it, feeling it beyond me, until I sent the first draft to my editor. I got the sort of feedback that you dread but more so because you know it’s true, that you have work to do, that it’s not quite there yet, etc.

  The trick for this particular book was how to have each essay/chapter have a mini-resolution but not enough of one where the book loses momentum. It also took me a long time to figure out how to end it in a way that could carry all the emotional weight that came before but not be false or too tidy or undermining. I think at one point I literally Googled “suspense.” I was semi-resentful initially at having to even think about this stuff—what was I, a fiction writer?—but really, I was just in uncomfortable territory, doing something I didn’t know how to do yet.

  Then one day on a walk it came to me as almost a revelation: I could structure the last chapter the same way I did the pregnancy chapter (“Holding Patterns”)—short, numbered sections written in the present tense. This form can feel like a cheat to me, and I think people use it when it isn’t justified, so I hesitated. But when I realized it would solve the bigger problem—of resolution and suspense and so on—I just went for it. It wasn’t as simple as cutting the last few paragraphs of every essay that came before and adding them to this last one, but in many cases that’s exactly what I did. And it still feels like a cheat, but I think it works enough to not matter. I don’t know how else I would have solved the structure of the book.

  coverTM: What books on motherhood and parenting did you look to as you were writing yours? I certainly felt a spiritual connection to Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, which you quote in the epigraph: “Oh dear, they say. Poor baby. They do not mean me.” I’m curious what other books lit your path, and why they spoke to you.

  MO: Well, once I started writing mine I actively avoided reading anything too similar, but I read them all already and had the books sort of ringing in my head, spurring me on.

  coverI read all of Rachel Cusk’s other books, for instance. And Maggie Nelson’s. I remember reading a passage in The Red Parts that unlocked something for me—I’m looking through the book now and nothing jumps out, and I don’t even remember what I took away from it. What I remember and miss now, being out of that stage of the writing process, was the feeling of something being unlocked. It was always a little beyond language, just a sense of possibility, a door opening in my brain after I’d been hitting a wall. Despondency giving way to hope.

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  I read a lot of Sylvia Plath, which I guess is funny. Her journals, her poetry. Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, which is a genius book. Then a lot Anne Sexton poetry. I also read Knausgaard. Book 5 and then reread Book 2.

  coverI mean if Sylvia Plath can write Ariel and if Knausgaard can write My Struggle…

  As a person, I am self-conscious and shy and I second-guess myself, but as a writer I am trying to break out of that, to be unabashed and unapologetic (about being abashed and apologetic) in a way I wish I could be in life. I think I turned to writers who really know how to wield and twist the knife, to remind myself that in this realm, I can be that way, too.

  TM: It feels like we’ve gotten some terrific mother-centric literature in the past few years. Moms are really enjoying some cultural relevance right now! Any hypotheses of why that is?

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  MO: I could answer this a dozen different ways and none would be the full picture. But from a publishing perspective—maybe the least interesting but most straightforward way to look at this? My theory is that there were a few breakout hits three to five years ago and we are currently in the next wave of that. Of bigger houses acquiring books that might have seemed like more of a risk before Graywolf published The Argonauts (2015) and On Immunity (2014), for instance. A book of personal essays by an unknown entity about something “ordinary” is a hard sell in publishing, but it’s maybe easier than it’s ever been? Again, look to 2014: Graywolf published the breakout Empathy Exams and Harper Perennial published Bad Feminist—in an interview for Scratch, Roxane Gay said her advance for that book was $15,000.

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  I also remember the rave New York Times review for Elisa Albert’s After Birth, written by the inimitable Merritt Tierce, as a particular MOMENT. That was March 2015.

  2014 was the year I had my son. So all of this was happening as I started writing my own book. Whether writing about this stuff was respectable, or intellectual, or ART, felt like less of a question than it had ever been. I imagine other writers had the same experience.

  TM: Because this is The Millions, I must ask: What’s the last great book you read?

  coverMO: Well, this being The Millions, I have a very relevant answer: Lydia Kiesling’s forthcoming novel, The Golden State. I love the voice and prose style so much, I could have stayed swimming in it forever. It’s the perfect mix of bleak and funny and angry and desperate and tender. Also motifs such as string cheese, cigarettes, small-town restaurants, road trips, work emails—I JUST LOVED IT.

  For more about Mom Rage, be sure to access all the episodes here.

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  EDAN LEPUCKI is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

• Refinery29 - https://www.refinery29.com/2018/04/195542/meaghan-oconnell-pregnancy-memoir-and-now-we-have-everything

  QUOTED: "When I started writing about this, I never thought motherhood would be my beat. I imagined it would be so separate. I would be a mom at home, and go out and write and be in public as a normal person who didn’t talk about her baby too much, because that would be annoying. But it was honestly great because I always wanted to be a writer and write a book one day, but I never knew what I wanted to write about. I never had that urgency that I felt after I had the baby."

  Meaghan O'Connell's New Book About Motherhood Is Essential Reading — For Everyone
  ELENA NICOLAOU
  APRIL 13, 2018, 9:20 AM

  and now we have everything meaghan o'connell

  Meaghan O’Connell wrote her memoir, And Now We Have Everything, out April 10, for you. She wrote it for anyone who might have a baby someday, or anyone who knows someone who might have a baby one day, or anyone who once had a baby themselves. She wrote it for her 29-year-old past self, who didn’t have a frank, funny, honest account of what pregnancy did to the body, and what expectations of motherhood did to the mind. O’Connell had to undergo the process alone — at least we have her as a guide.
  Three months after her son was born, O’Connell wrote “A Birth Story,” an almost shockingly detailed account of the birth process — complete with a gory description of an epidural — that takes almost an hour to read, and was published on Longreads in 2014. After the essay was published, O’Connell began to write more; to reflect on parenting even before she was firmly comfortable with her new identity as a mother. "This was my way of making sense of everything," O’Connell told Refinery29.
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  What came out of those sessions was a wise, essential memoir about pregnancy and motherhood – but also about dealing with life when it veers off the expected tracks. We spoke to O'Connell about postpartum depression, baby names, and why it seems honest accounts like hers are all too scarce, even in 2018.
  When I was reading this book, I kept thinking: How could I not have known any of this before? Does it ever strike you as a conspiracy, almost, that these experiences and facts of what happens during motherhood are kept so hush hush?
  "I don’t know if it’s a conspiracy, but it definitely feels that way. Women don’t want to be the person to say, 'It was really bad for me.' But I couldn’t deny it. Once I was in it, it felt like the biggest mindfuck. There was no pretending that everything was beautiful. It feels vulnerable to say, 'I didn’t handle this well.' You don’t want to be the person who couldn’t cope. But I’ve made peace with that by now. Then, you’re worried people won’t understand. You don’t want your friends who don’t have kids yet to think you’re an idiot for doing it, either. There’s a defensiveness. You’re trying to defend your life because you feel so unsupported, anyway, in this mom-cave."
  You have to defend your individual experience against the myth of motherhood, and how it’s all supposed to be.
  "Right. But that’s what I try to do with my writing. Trust that if something is feeling hard for me, then it’s not just me. I’m sure a lot of people cope better with sleep deprivation, childbirth, and breastfeeding — I’m sure there are also women that haven’t. It feels hard to talk about, on top of living through it. But, to me, there’s nothing better than sitting with another woman and saying, 'Wasn’t that horrible?' and connecting on that level."
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  The book begins with a scene of you talking to your friends about a possible pregnancy. It sets the tone for the rest of the book — I almost felt like I was your friend while reading it. Were you writing for a certain audience in mind?
  "That chapter with my friends when I want to tell them what happened [after the birth], but I haven’t figured out how to tell them yet — that was the impulse behind writing the book. I don’t want there to be a chasm between us and say, 'Oh, they won’t understand.' I hated that when people said that to me — 'Oh, you can’t understand a mother’s love for a child until you have a baby.' Well, let’s just try. Giving up on connecting with them about this huge part of my life that I felt changed by kind of felt like giving up on our friendship. Early on, when I first started writing the book, I hadn’t fully transitioned into the identity of mother yet. I definitely felt like I was trying to tell myself — or my past self, or my friends who hadn’t done it — and trying to bridge that gap.
  "So much was this onslaught, the day in, day out of taking care of the baby. Trying to tread water. I knew I felt bad, but it was hard to get to the bottom of it. In a lot of the book, too, I felt like I was trying to explain to Dustin, my husband. Why am I crying all the time? Being in it every day made it hard to communicate. This was my way of making sense of everything."
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  “
  IT FEELS VULNERABLE TO SAY, 'I DIDN’T HANDLE THIS WELL.' YOU DON’T WANT TO BE THE PERSON WHO COULDN’T COPE. BUT I’VE MADE PEACE WITH THAT BY NOW.
  ”
  You brought up Dustin, who is such an important presence in the book. In many ways, he’s unencumbered by the burdens that you have as a woman, that you inherited because you’re supposed to act like a "mom." Did having a baby make you more aware of gender roles?
  "Yes. We still are intent on sharing the load, and aware of emotional labor. But, when the baby came, we couldn’t split breastfeeding, we couldn’t split the physical trauma of childbirth. That’s all on me. He didn’t have postpartum depression.
  "In a way, he was compensating for it by doing everything he could around the house, and keeping us afloat while I flailed. It made me jealous or competitive with him in the moment, because I was in a bad place. It’s a luxury that he could do that. Now that I’m out of it, I can think of how hard that was for him. To feel a little helpless and, on the outside, trying to be relevant."
  As an aside, did you ever see that video of men undergoing labor pain?
  "Yes, I remember watching it while I was pregnant, and making Dustin watch it. I want that so much with everything. Subjectivity drives me crazy. That’s why I write. I wish everybody could feel my labor for 30 seconds, so you know what I’m talking about. It’s so frustrating that pain is subjective."
  Whenever I speak to women who have given birth, they’ll describe it in a few sentences — but you give us an hour of how bad it really was. Every person I know has been born from this. With that in mind, who do you hope ends up reading your book? Just women, or men, too?
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  "When I was writing it, I imagined writing it for women who hadn’t done it yet. I was so frustrated when I was pregnant, because I was like, 'What’s it going to be like?' That’s all I wanted to know. How am I going to feel? Of course, it’s hard to know how your individual person will react. The deeper I got into the book, the more I was grappling with my relationship with Dustin, and trying to communicate to him in ways I couldn’t in the moment. It’s a book for women, but I have heard from a few men that men should read this, too. We were all born. We all know women and have mothers."
  meaghan o'connell

  Earlier, you said you just wanted to know what pregnancy and motherhood were like, but didn’t feel like you had a resource. Why do you think there’s a lack of frank discussion around this universal experience?
  "I feel like it’s changing. Well, I never know if I’m just exposed to this stuff more now, or I seek it out. It’s out there more and more. But, compared to how common the experience is — when you consider how many people go through this, and don’t talk about it. Imagine if we had no books about, say, work. Or, if we had five really good books about work, instead of it being threaded into everything."
  I’ve heard from women who have given birth that, eventually, they forget about it. And that’s why they can have another baby. But, you’re doing press for this book, and it’s like you’re reliving all of these early experiences in your mind. What’s that like?
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  "Especially when I’m pregnant! It’s intense. I’ve had to go back to my therapist. I feel like I’m a good friend to talk to if you have a new baby, because I have to remember it. I spent two years writing about it and editing it and being in that headspace. Once you're out of that newborn phase and not pumping anymore, and your baby's sleeping through the night, it’s a completely different experience. Then you romanticize the early days. You forget because it’s such a weird alternate universe.
  "I don't want to say it scares me, but I’m going through it with open eyes. I sat down with my therapist and she wrote down: 'Tell your doctors and nurses that you had trauma with your last birth. Protect your sleep. Take SSRIs if you have depression again.' I feel so much better having a realistic approach to it. I’m working with myself to feel more prepared in a real way, instead of an aspirational way. Part of what was so hard the first time was not knowing what you were getting into, which makes it easier to idealize. But, now I’m like, okay. If I go a couple of nights without sleeping, that’s bad for me. I don’t want to go into the dark place again. And if I do, I hope I can remember it’s temporary. I feel a lot better. It’s more exciting, because I know what a baby is, and know that they’re not babies forever. When they’re people, I really like them."
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  You have your younger self to be in conversation with, to help guide you through this process again.
  "Yeah. I can’t be in denial. I know this material now."
  Well, it’s not like you were in denial before. You just didn’t know. How could you have known?
  "I know. It feels like I was delusional. But I have compassion for myself."
  Right. And something you talk about in the book is how you were getting information from every side about what you have to do — you have to breastfeed, you have to have a natural birth. You were trying to do the right thing.
  "Exactly. That’s the difference now. I still am trying to do the right thing, but I know what the right thing is for me and my family now, instead of the best thing I could find in a book. I'm already a mother. I know what I need. I know what matters to me. I have my own values now. Before, I don’t know if it was because I was younger or just hadn’t done it, I was so worried about being a 'bad' mom and doing this at all. I had imposter syndrome. I was like, I have to do everything the hardest way possible, because that’s the best. Not having that mindset is like night and day. It’s so good."
  “
  I STILL AM TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING, BUT I KNOW WHAT THE RIGHT THING IS FOR ME AND MY FAMILY NOW, INSTEAD OF THE BEST THING I COULD FIND IN A BOOK.
  ”
  In this book, you struggle to adopt the identity of "mother." Since then, you’ve become someone who writes about motherhood in a column and a book. You've become a voice for mothers. How do you feel about your role as someone who regularly speaks about the experience?
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  "I haven’t really thought about it until now. When I started writing about this, I never thought motherhood would be my beat. I imagined it would be so separate. I would be a mom at home, and go out and write and be in public as a normal person who didn’t talk about her baby too much, because that would be annoying. But it was honestly great because I always wanted to be a writer and write a book one day, but I never knew what I wanted to write about. I never had that urgency that I felt after I had the baby.
  "I had those self-doubt moments. Am I going to be pigeonholed? Is this what I'm going to write about forever? But I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I was getting paid to write about something I really wanted to write about, and I felt like I had something to say, maybe for the first time in my life. I tried not to second guess it. It’s been really rewarding. I’m working on a novel that is nothing about this — more early 20s stuff. But I’m having a baby again so I’m back in it, just as thought I was emerging from a cocoon."
  What did you choose to leave the baby unnamed in the book?
  "Mostly for my son’s privacy. Before we had the baby, we were like, 'Okay: What are the rules?' That was before I knew I was going to write about it. We tried to keep photos of him and his name private. Our Instagrams are locked down. I worry about it less now. It did get tricky in writing the book. One of my copy editors asked if we could give him a nickname, because it was awkward to keep saying the baby. It was a weird challenge. But this book is not about him. Life is about him, but [in the book] he’s sort of an avatar for this change. It’s about my experience. I don't want to say that he was a prop, but in the book that’s how it functions. A catalyst, not a character. Plus he’s a baby. He didn’t talk. Babies are kind of cute lumps at first."
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  You and Dustin were the people, and the baby was... a baby.
  "He didn’t feel like a person to me. Maybe with the second baby he feels more like a person now, because I know that he will be one day."

QUOTED: "The author's story will resonate deeply."
"a well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that take place during pregnancy and early motherhood."

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Print Marked Items
O'Connell, Meaghan: AND NOW WE
HAVE EVERYTHING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
O'Connell, Meaghan AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 4, 10
ISBN: 978-0-316-39384-3
Navigating the ups and downs of being a new mother.
O'Connell and her partner, Dustin, were contemplating marriage, but the idea of having a child was the
farthest thing from both their minds. They had careers to advance, books to write, and other things to do
with their lives; there was no time for a kid. Then she got pregnant. Like many soon-to-be moms, O'Connell
read everything she could find on pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding, but nothing prepared her for the
actual events as they unfolded. In this compact narrative, the author begins slowly, telling her backstory and
working through the "wow, I'm pregnant" stage of telling her friends and adjusting to her body as it changed
over the months. She incorporates humor and honesty, but this part of the story will feel overly familiar to
many readers. Then the prose shifts as she recounts the birth itself. Suddenly, the writing becomes more
visceral and dynamic, and she shares the very intimate details of what it was like to spend 40 hours in labor.
The author's engaging tone continues with her discussions of the real feelings she had about her body after
pregnancy, her trials with breast-feeding, the resentment she felt toward Dustin, who seemed to be a better
parent than she was, and the lack of sexual desire she experienced for months after the birth. For current
mothers, the author's story will resonate deeply. For any woman contemplating having a child, O'Connell
provides an accurate depiction of what it can feel like to be a new mom, both physically and emotionally.
For men who want to know and understand what being a mother is like, this book should prove useful.
A well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that
take place during pregnancy and early motherhood, times that are both "traumatic [and] transcendent."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"O'Connell, Meaghan: AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959736/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7f36e632. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959736

QUOTED: "[describes] motherhood with brutal honesty and a sharp wit."
"The result is a delight."

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And Now We Have Everything: On
Motherhood before I Was Ready
Maggie Taft
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p4+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood before I Was Ready. By Meaghan O'Connell. Apr. 2018.
240p. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316393843); e-book, $13.99 (9780316393836). 306.874.
"I was wanting something I didn't want to want," O'Connell writes of what she felt after learning she was
pregnant. And so begins a book about her tug of war between intellect and emotion in the subsequent
months of pregnancy and early motherhood. O'Connell is a smart twentysomething who treats her
pregnancy like a new project, researching and planning. She envisions a natural birth and a year of
wholesome breast feeding. But things do not go as she expects. Life throws curveballs, and after 40 hours of
contractions, she opts for a C-section. She manages to nurse for a year but resents her baby's control over
her body. This is not a book about the wonders of motherhood but about the tension between culturally
inherited ideals and the realities of lived, bodily experience. "What if we treated pregnant women like
thinking adults? What if we worried less about making a bad impression?" O'Connell asks. Describing
motherhood with brutal honesty and a sharp wit, And Now We Have Everything does just this. The result is
a delight.--Maggie Taft
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taft, Maggie. "And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood before I Was Ready." Booklist, 1 Mar.
2018, p. 4+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250742/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f0c38db. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250742

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/04/17/600106400/and-now-we-have-everything-charts-the-emotional-extremes-of-an-ordinary-pregnanc
  Word count: 657

  And Now We Have Everything' Charts The Emotional Extremes Of An Ordinary Pregnancy

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  April 17, 201810:00 AM ET
  ANNALISA QUINN
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  And Now We Have Everything
  And Now We Have Everything
  On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
  by Meaghan O'connell

  Hardcover, 240 pages purchase

  Childbirth is sometimes treated like a specialty interest for women, like ceramics or cross country skiing. You know the contours, vaguely, but you wouldn't seek out information unless you were thinking about doing the thing yourself. Obviously, when it comes to motherhood, this is deeply dumb: Someone gave birth to each of us, probably while in a lot of pain.

  I didn't realize how little I knew about it until I read Meaghan O'Connell's wry, brutal And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready, which catalogues the fear and anxiety of pregnancy, the agony of the birth itself, the c-section scar, the sore nipples, the exhaustion, and the months of "rolling around in the human condition."

  "We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us," O'Connell writes. "Endure the car crash of childbirth then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive. Rock, sway, bounce, pace, sing, hum — [my husband] Dustin did anything to keep him from crying but it always came back to me, my swollen breasts, nipples scabbed over, milk dripping everywhere and the baby flailing."

  For O'Connell, love is mixed with constant fear: "[W]ith every sleepless night, the world [became] full of sharper and sharper edges ... anything seemed possible. Any horrible thing." She and her husband didn't just create a life: "We created a death."

  O'Connell is also writing against the persistent tropes of motherhood: "Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? A mom is a relationship, not an individual ... Moms nag. Moms are stressed out. I know it's all internalized misogyny and guilt and bad public policy but I still can't really get around it."

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  She details, too, the unrelenting toll on her body: "My entire middle section ... looked like a balloon that had been deflated but also, somehow, was full of wet dough ... It bore no resemblance to any version of myself I'd ever seen." Her milk comes down as she tries to work: "It was like needing to pee emotionally." And her sex life withers: "Sex struck me as not just repugnant but quaint — the province of naive people who had too much time on their hands. People who didn't have children."

  So much of pregnancy language is euphemisms about paths and journeys, flowers and rivers. O'Connell thinks that obscuring the reality only serves to make women feel guilty for suffering: "What if," when talking about giving birth, "instead of worrying about scaring women, we told them the truth?" O'Connell asks. "What if we treated women like thinking adults?"

  The memoir industry runs increasingly on the unique, the superhuman, and the grotesque. People climb mountains, escape kidnappers, visit heaven and report back. But And Now We Have Everything shows how the most normal thing in the world — having an ordinary, healthy baby after an ordinary, healthy pregnancy — means being visited with all possible extremes of pain, fear, and love. O'Connell renders this normal and horrific experience real, in both emotional sweep and brutal particulars. The questions she asks is simple: What is it like? And this joyous, useful, grim book tells it straight: "F****** awful."

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/23/and-now-we-have-everything-by-meaghan-oconnellr-review
  Word count: 1175

  And Now We Have Everything review – the shock of motherhood
  What if women were told the truth? Meaghan O’Connell chronicles the blood, sweat and tears of having a baby
  RO Kwon
  Sat 23 Jun 2018 02.30 EDT Last modified on Tue 26 Jun 2018 10.27 EDT

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  Striking descriptions … Meaghan O’Connell
  Striking descriptions … Meaghan O’Connell
  Lately I’ve found I gobble up birth stories. I read them all. As I don’t have children, nor do I seem to want them, perhaps my curiosity has to do with how little I know about this common, pivotal experience. We’ve each been formed, grown in, and either pushed or pulled from a woman’s body, yet for most of my life I’ve learned less about childbirth than I have about, for example, the intricacies of trench warfare. Should nothing but stories concerning pregnancy and early motherhood be published for the next 10 years, it would hardly redress the vast historical imbalance between what humans experience and what has been judged worth documenting. More English language literature has probably been written about medieval jousting than about childbirth. This lack is yet another of patriarchy’s gifts.

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  But I’m in luck: there has been an upsurge of books that focus on motherhood, and this memoir is a vivid, often harrowing example of the genre. Meaghan O’Connell became pregnant at 29, sooner than she had planned; though anxious about the timing, she and her boyfriend, Dustin, elected not to have an abortion.

  “What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth?” O’Connell asks. “What if pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?” Her account is energised by her devotion to revealing the truth. Dating in New York, she says, meant she knew “how not to need anything”; “wanting a baby was a desperate quality in a woman, like wanting a relationship multiplied by a thousand.” O’Connell hoped for a child but she also had doubts. (After learning she was pregnant, she panic-Googled phrases such as “I regret having my child”, “baby age 29” and “writing career, baby”.)

  O’Connell is ​open about the ​sometimes ​competing ​feelings of fear and desire, shame and artistic ambition
  O’Connell intended to have a natural childbirth but after more than 24 hours of painful labour she asked for an epidural – it was little help, as the anaesthetic failed to numb part of her body. There turned out to be a “blind spot”, five square inches where it felt as though a demon was “chopping” at her “from the inside with a pickaxe”. As further ineffective epidurals were administered she shouted that she wanted to die. Then, at last, she had a caesarean section. Weeks of bleeding followed, and her body was so ravaged that, the first time she looked in the mirror, she wept: her “entire middle section” was “covered in purplish red gashes” and was hanging like a balloon that had been deflated, but was “also, somehow, full of wet dough”.

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  O’Connell’s chronicle of her life after her son is born includes frank, striking descriptions of physical problems such as mastitis: the milk-duct infection, she writes, is “like having the flu and then getting stabbed in the tits at the same time”. Breastfeeding was initially so painful that her breasts felt like skinned knees on which she had to crawl. The stabbing analogy returns when she explains what it was like to attempt sex in the months after having given birth: “postpartum knife dick”, she and her friends call it, shooting pains that result from low oestrogen. Before giving birth, she considered sex and intimacy to be “the main reason to be alive or the surest way to feel alive”; afterwards, for a year, her body was so hormonally altered that she’d have preferred sex didn’t exist.

  O’Connell is open, too, about the competing feelings of fear and desire, shame and artistic ambition. The first time she left her son for an hour so as to go to a cafe and write, she felt as if she might cry – this time, from happiness. “I was always doing math with the hours, testing the limits of time, trying to see how much living I could get away with.” Contrary to popular belief, breastfeeding wasn’t “one of the most incredible experiences of your life”. She did her duty, wondering all the while whether its importance had been oversold; it was “sometimes lovely but more often not”. Then, there was the continuing parental terror, the persistent gut feeling that her beloved child was about to die. In giving birth, she realises, “we created a death”.

  Midway through And Now We Have Everything, there’s a wonderful scene in which O’Connell’s friends pay her a visit shortly after her son is born. Conversation is stilted until she asks if they want to see her stretch marks. Yes, they say, eagerly. They are aghast at what she shows them, while she is embarrassed but relieved. “I needed witnesses”, she says. “I needed my reality confirmed.” Her book is a testament, a gift to mothers who might want their realities confirmed, as well as to everyone else.

  And Now We Have Everything is published by Little, Brown US
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• NYT
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/books/review/and-now-we-have-everything-meaghan-oconnell.html
  Word count: 922

  QUOTED: "And Now We Have Everything is a welcome antidote in the panicked-expectant-mothers canon — though its fast-paced and gripping narrative will appeal to nonparents, too."

  This Author Never Dreamed of Becoming a Mom. Until She Was One.
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  By Isabel Wilkinson
  May 16, 2018

  AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING
  On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
  By Meaghan O’Connell
  230 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $26.

  A few weeks after she gave birth, somewhere between her baby’s feedings and naps, a friend sent me a long email detailing what she’d learned about motherhood so far. Certain products she’d been told to buy were utterly useless; a specific breastfeeding pillow she’d found to be a godsend.
  Image
  Meaghan O’ConnellCreditKelly Searle
  This is how the first six months of my own pregnancy have gone so far: I’ve been the recipient of 10-paragraph emails, Google spreadsheets, filled-up Amazon carts, group texts — all themed around babies and the mental and physical tools required to prepare for them. As more friends have kids, this stream of information gets steadily replaced by reports from the other side: women who have made it through the gantlet and reported back.
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  This information exchange has left me both enormously grateful and utterly panicked. I feel as though I’m back in school, cramming for a final — only to learn that the one chapter I haven’t studied is the focus of the test. In all of this, I’ve learned only one thing to be universally true: For all the Google docs you share, baby books you buy and delivery plans you make, childbirth is an experience for which you will never be truly prepared.

  Meaghan O’Connell’s “And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready” makes this abundantly clear — and, as a result, is the only baby-themed book that has yet offered me actual solace. This is due in large part to the fact that O’Connell offers no advice. She doesn’t recommend certain carriers or protein-rich diets, nor does she feel compelled to tell you how pregnancy and motherhood ought to be. Rather, hers is a completely honest, often neurotic and searingly funny memoir of her pregnancy and childbirth.

  When O’Connell, a writer living in Brooklyn, learns she is pregnant, she instinctively wants a child but, given the circumstances of her life and work, feels unready. After a long discussion with her boyfriend, Dustin, that begins as they’re picking up their weekly farm share and continues into the night, the couple finally, definitively decides to keep the baby.

  Image

  She shares the news with friends, casually posts about it on Instagram, navigates the steady stream of doctor’s appointments — all while a petrified, what-on-earth-am-I-doing feeling simmers under the surface. Everything feels life-or-death as she’s living it, unable to foresee that it’s all going to turn out fine. There is a car trip with Dustin in which she doesn’t feel the baby kick. Her mind leaps to the worst possible place: “‘The baby is dead!’ I scream the scream of a woman who is not being taken seriously, who is not being fed enough, coddled enough, who is not being ultrasounded every hour so that she can be reassured that the possible is not probable, is not inevitable.” She worries about losing the baby, about not savoring pregnancy enough — about not being a good mother.
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  The author quickly learns the difference between pregnancy and the way it is performed for the world. “There should be Polaroids our son finds in a shoe box 30 years from now and feels sentimental about,” she writes. “I want this baby to think his mom was radiant, effortlessly so, hugging her massive, miraculous body in floral prints. I want him to post them to the 2045 version of Instagram. I want his friends to leave comments about my fashion sense.”

  Much of her pregnancy is spent planning for a natural birth until the particularly harrowing scene in which she receives an epidural and then an emergency cesarean section. Once her baby is born, when friends come to visit, she envisions herself as “the matriarch welcoming everyone in with French-press coffee and banana bread that I had somehow baked during early labor,” even though in reality she is bleary-eyed and rattled from the surgery. Eventually, after conquering her constant fear of SIDS, she gets the hang of it — and finds in motherhood an unexpected peace.

  “And Now We Have Everything” is a welcome antidote in the panicked-expectant-mothers canon — though its fast-paced and gripping narrative will appeal to nonparents, too. Read this, I’ll reply in the future when friends ask me for my pregnancy Google docs. It will make you feel less alone.
  Isabel Wilkinson is the digital director at T Magazine.

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