“I was surprised—though I shouldn’t have been—to discover that a book on mothering was also about not-mothering. Yet the problem of an unplanned pregnancy, for women born between 1900 and 1945, is a story that runs throughout my book. Of the women I’m writing about, almost all struggled for access to birth control. Several had at least one abortion. To have some control over the timing and material circumstances of pregnancy and child-rearing is essential to the practice of the mother-writer or mother-artist…”

In response to the growing pressure on reproductive rights in America, Literary Hub published a short excerpt from my upcoming (really!) book on writing and mothering, The Baby on the Fire Escape. [Read more]