Look How Happy I'm Making You
Stories

Besprechung
A frank, smart, poignant-without-being-sentimental story collection.
Curtis Sittenfeld, Los Angeles Times

[A] debut collection of stories that should be required reading for all women of childbearing years. . . . Precise, quirky and magical.
Cathy Alter, The Washington Post/The Lily

Armed with wit, tenderness and candor, Rosenwaike helps obliterate any taboos that may still exist surrounding the tribulations of women s reproductive lives.
People (Book of the Week)

A beautifully written and beautifully conceived series of stories about, well, conception about the harrowing and mundane and profound ramifications of trying to extend the species. Among the thousands of books for prospective and new parents, I doubt any will make you feel more understood and less alone than this one.
Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

Whatever your stance on becoming a mom, you ll want to read this book.
Bustle

  The stories in this collection of short fiction explore every facet of motherhood fertility, pregnancy, the baby-years, the flipside (childlessness), and more treating the most intimate details of women s lives with ruthless attention and tender care.  
Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink

Offers a candid look into one of the most intimate choices a woman can make with humor and heart.
Glamour

I rejoiced in this collection. A radical, unflinching cycle of stories that radiate with truth and depth and care. I could weep for how good it is to see such rich, profound narratives about women s reproductive lives. Happy tears.
Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

This polychromatic assortment of fictional tales plumbs the wonders and woes of the maternal."
O, The Oprah Magazine

Rosenwaike s stories turn the idealized Madonna view of childbearing on its head.
Ms.

  [Rosenwaike] captures what it is to be a mother, a would-be mother, an almost mother or a not-mother with such clever perceptiveness making the stories recognizable, familiar and strangely comforting.
The Independent (UK)

Rosenwaike fully inhabits the interiority of [her characters] and though they reside in overlapping spheres, each is distinct in her desires, jealousies, fears, and hopes.
Buzzfeed

Deeply resonant. . . . An exquisite collection that is candid, compassionate, and emotionally complex.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Striking. . . . Rosenwaike s edgy stories are endearingly honest, excruciatingly detailed, and irresistibly intimate, expertly depicting what motherhood means to millennials.
Publishers Weekly

Rosenwaike s remarkable prose conjures emotions so effectively that readers will feel pulled into the characters lives.
Booklist

Textauszug
Grow Your Eyelashes
 
We are all in love with the baby. We, meaning the #4 bus community, weekdays at the seven o clock hour, on our way to work and school and early morning errands. The baby wears a royal blue puffy jacket and a striped knit hat. He tracks our shopworn, overly articulated faces. Despite how we caper tilting and bouncing our heads, scrunching our lips and wriggling our noses, working our hands into frantic waves the baby gazes at us with his grave baby face. He is chary with his baby gift of a grin, a palm in the air, a mimic, obliging just often enough to lend hope to our campaigns. The father is charming, an early-thirties smiler with warm eyes and skin. Perhaps South American, his soft voice generous with the vowels. Strapped to the father s chest, the baby flaps his arms. There is something of a bird in him, both cautious and confident. Something of a bird, and a sad little clown, and a medicine man, and all of the possibilities that are open to a baby. We look at him longer than we would look at anyone else we don t actually know and he will not say, or even think, that it is rude to stare. 

I say that we are all in love with the baby, but probably there is someone on this bus who is not. Probably someone looks out the window, or at the affable father, or at her own lap, and thinks, goddamn that baby. This person is not swayed by the miniature hands, the swollen cheeks, the exploratory chirps not swayed by this new human, welcomed as if he belongs to all of our delicate hopes and magnanimous impulses. As other faces soften, she hardens hers. I am willing to believe that there is such a person in our cozy bus community, with the chatty women and the tenderly grizzled men, and the driver who says So long, little guy when the baby leaves, borne aloft by his father.



We are trying, my husband Kevin and I. If only that meant we were trying to teach a monkey to do sign language; or trying out this new robot that cleans bathrooms; or trying to save the world, one polar ice cap at a time. But when you are a childless couple in your mid-thirties with two full-time jobs and a three-bedroom house, everyone knows what trying means. Making love, we used to think penis or breasts, vagina or balls. Thought them hard, as the dependable pleasure things they were. Then we thought baby, almost sexier than sex for sex, a mystery beyond tit-for-tat physical love. We thought not quite sperm and egg, those clinical, unlovely words, but something like seed pearl embryo pregnant fetus heartbeat fingers toes belly bump love genius baby. We have been thinking this baby into limbo existence for eleven months now. The baby isn t coming. The baby is perched somewhere, her fist in her fierce, dainty mouth. I picture her the way Christian children are taught to think of babies God hasn t released from heaven yet. A peck of them fully formed and squeaky clean, enthroned in clouds, parents an unnecessary earthly contrivance. 


 
Kevin and I have the kind of grown-up jobs that cause people to nod politely when we say what we do and not ask any follow-up questions. I work as a web developer for a creative agency and Kevin s a software engineer. I wear my peasant blouses and flared skirts on the bus, and he drives to work in his suit. Though he could dress more casually, he likes the advantage the formality gives him. He s not especially handsome, but his shirt is crisp, his tie well chosen, his fingernails trimmed, and his hair nicely kept, neat with a bit of bounce. What more can a man do? 

Before we met, I had hoped to find someone in an old-fashioned, romantic way: at a coffee shop, on a train, at my high school reunion (the guys I hoped to meet again were the ones I hadn t talked to in high school, whose sleepy, sexy faces I stared at through an algebra or social st

Beschreibung
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
GLAMOUR  KIRKUS REVIEWS

The women in Polly Rosenwaike s Look How Happy I'm Making You want to be mothers, or aren t sure they want to be mothers, or having recently given birth are overwhelmed by what they ve wrought. One woman struggling with infertility deals with the news that her sister is pregnant. Another, nervous about her biological clock, forgets to take her birth control while dating a younger man and must confront the possibility of becoming a single parent. Four motherless women who meet in a bar every Mother s Day contend with their losses and what it would mean for one of them to have a child.

Clever, empathetic, and precisely observed, these stories offer rare, honest portrayals of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women s most intimate choices.