I finished it! I liked it overall. It was very limited in scope, but I found it to be an honest portrayal, which I appreciated. What did you end up disliking about it?
i could not STAND that the tone throughout was her combatting the narrative of her being too privileged to be suffering from PPD or that she was responsible for it, and then she totally accepted her "friends'" explanations that she was accountable for her husband's infidelity and that it was her fault her PPD "drove him away"
Oh yeah, I think this is totally valid criticism. I think my general critique of the book would be something along the lines of, while I appreciated Hoover's raw honesty about her experience, I'm not quite sure it was a story fully ready to be told? Or that she was the best messenger for what I feel is a very common experience despite elements that clearly made it uncommon. At the end of the book I didn't feel like she had fully unpacked her experience even if she conveyed her truth well.
But I did find it an honest account of unexpected past trauma resurfacing during pregnancy/birth, common/normalized birth trauma, the knowledge gap of expectation vs reality when it comes to pregnancy/birth/postpartum, and a good depiction of postpartum mood disorder.
yes! i think you're capturing what i more recently felt with "restaurant kid"—i valued the story she was telling but thought that the way she told it took away from the story itself, which is always so hazy anyways with memoir and distancing yourself enough from the work and the author to evaluate it as a piece of literature. but i agree that in this case, hoover's ability to capture her PPD in relation to her privilege did have value!
I loved your thoughts on watching your kids grow older. The Nguyen book sounds excellent, I hadn't heard of it before. Also subscribed to Plain English, it's new to me! Thank you for sharing 🙂
okay i'm going to need to hear your thoughts when you finish the motherload, because i liked some of it and totally hated it by the end 😂
I finished it! I liked it overall. It was very limited in scope, but I found it to be an honest portrayal, which I appreciated. What did you end up disliking about it?
i could not STAND that the tone throughout was her combatting the narrative of her being too privileged to be suffering from PPD or that she was responsible for it, and then she totally accepted her "friends'" explanations that she was accountable for her husband's infidelity and that it was her fault her PPD "drove him away"
Oh yeah, I think this is totally valid criticism. I think my general critique of the book would be something along the lines of, while I appreciated Hoover's raw honesty about her experience, I'm not quite sure it was a story fully ready to be told? Or that she was the best messenger for what I feel is a very common experience despite elements that clearly made it uncommon. At the end of the book I didn't feel like she had fully unpacked her experience even if she conveyed her truth well.
But I did find it an honest account of unexpected past trauma resurfacing during pregnancy/birth, common/normalized birth trauma, the knowledge gap of expectation vs reality when it comes to pregnancy/birth/postpartum, and a good depiction of postpartum mood disorder.
i'm also tipsy so take my literary analysis with a grain of salt 😂😂😂
🤣
yes! i think you're capturing what i more recently felt with "restaurant kid"—i valued the story she was telling but thought that the way she told it took away from the story itself, which is always so hazy anyways with memoir and distancing yourself enough from the work and the author to evaluate it as a piece of literature. but i agree that in this case, hoover's ability to capture her PPD in relation to her privilege did have value!
I loved your thoughts on watching your kids grow older. The Nguyen book sounds excellent, I hadn't heard of it before. Also subscribed to Plain English, it's new to me! Thank you for sharing 🙂