Review: Choosing You

Motherhood is intrinsically linked to weight.What was your "pre-pregnancy" weight? How much weight did you gain? How much does the baby weigh? How much weight did she gain (or lose) in the first two weeks? How fast did you discard matern ity clothes? How much does the baby weigh at two months? Have you returned to your pre-pregnancy weight yet? Can you zip your skinny jeans? It seems fitting then that so much of Alexandra Soiseth's memoir, Choosing You, centers around weight.

When Mother Talk asked for reviewers for this book, I clamored, "Me, Me, Me!" because a character in my WIP also contemplates single motherhood by choice, and because I assumed that Soiseth was a member of the infertile sisterhood. I hoped to learn some things that would flesh out my other research into the topic of single motherhood via sperm donation. What I didn't expect was to learn anything about ME. I didn't expect to be absolutely blindsided by my emotional response to this woman.

What sets Choosing You apart is Soiseth's unrelenting honesty, to the point that I don't feel comfortable referring to her by the more distant "Soiseth" and want to call her "Alex." She becomes as real as a friend, more connected to me even than bloggers I've read for five years. The intense connection she inspires is not simply the result of witty personal confessions. So many of the memoirs I've read recently are of the blog-to-book variety: chatty, fun, and full of personality. But, literary, they are not. Parenting memoirs are a hot commodity right now, but they seem to rank somewhere around romance novels in terms of respect and literary acclaim. Choosing You, however, IS literary--extraordinary well-written, beautiful imagery, and nary a cute checklist in sight.

I worry that more mainstream reviewers and readers might take Choosing You's subtitle, "Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own," as an absolute statement of genre: The single-mother memoir. Occupying slightly dustier real estate than the Mommy memoir at a bookstore near you. And that would be a shame. I read a ton of memoir, and this is the first in a long time that I read in a single sitting (with a seven month old no else) and cried over. More than once. This is up there with Sedaris, Didion,Lammont and the other great memorists. There's a reason why she directs the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence.  She crafts a masterful  narrative around all those warts-and-all confessions that ends up revealing some universal truths about all of us.

I fell a little bit in love with her when she described an eating binge moments after resolving to finally loose weight. Oh. My. She can come into my kitchen at anytime. After the birth of her daughter, she stops telling people that she lost 100 pounds because there's no point in it anymore. This is me right now. I'm spending my days in a size I swore I'd never wear again, and I'm not dieting. Not even close. I hide behind the shield of breastfeeding, but she's seven months old now, and plenty of other breastfeeding mothers are many pounds down. I say I'm waiting until I can do low-carb again, but that doesn't excuse the out-of-control portions. I'd like to reach some sort of peace with this, similar to Soiseth's, but in the meantime it helps to know I'm not alone.

This isn't a how-to piece, and her lack of medical knowledge is endearing at times. She's upfront about why she chose the route she did, and why she made some rather not so politically correct choices along the way. I like that she doesn't spend a lot of time justifying her decisions or minimizing their impact. It's also NOT an infertility memoir. Without giving away too much, it's the choices she wrestles with, not the mechanics. If you're at a point in your journey where you can't read anything even that even remotely smacks of, "We wanted a boy in May, so we drank some wine, and Whoops! Here we are!" you might want to pass this by for a little while. If you want to read about the double whammy of single-motherhood-by-choice AND infertility, I suggest you read Calliope or one of her many links.

I hope though that readers on all points of the infertility spectrum can identify with and enjoy this story. One of the neatest things that Soiseth reveals about herself is her uncanny ability to create community. She places herself at the center of overlapping families, socio-economic classes, and martial statuses to form a web of friendships that transcend any one choice, and she does the same thing with this book. For me it was the weight issue, but there's so much meat here that others may find their own ways of identifying with her: absent parents, abuse, bad boyfriends, best friends, moving, writing, and oh yeah, that whole single-mother thing. While it unifies the narrative arc, at times it becomes a mere footnote in a greater journey. I can heartily recommend this book to . . . just about anyone really. This isn't the story of becoming a single mother, it's the story of becoming human.