look how happy I'm making you - stories by polly rosenwaike

This afternoon at Politics and Prose bookstore I introduced a beautiful event for Elizabeth Geoghegan's collection of stories eightball - and Polly Rosenwaike's collection Look How Happy I'm Making You.  I have already blogged about Elizabeth's book -and about our friendship going back to my years in Rome, so I wanted to give a shout out for Polly's book too.

Hers is a moving and original collection of stories centered around questions of motherhood.  The stories are laid out pretty much chronologically, along the journey of becoming a mother - ending with stories about early motherhood. For me the most compelling stories deal with the question of when motherhood begins -and what kicks off the maternal instinct.  She explores a variety of early pregnancy experiences, especially the relationship potential mothers have to that time where, in her words, the fetus is "preoccupied with the big ontological stuff: to be or not to be; but at any moment could slip out in this world as clotted blood and fine tissue."

The quotation comes from what, in my view, is the most intimate and well crafted story of the collection "Period, Ellipsis, Full Stop." Here she juxtaposes a character's miscarriage with the editing work she is doing for a client who wants to debate every edit she makes in his work.  One of the flaws in his writing is that he keeps putting ellipses into his stories as a way of pointing towards a climactic moment he isn't capable of actually writing out.  His amateurish stories are written "as if you could set out to be something and get it right the first time, as if the whole of life wasn't about trying again."

I love what this says about the writing process - and also of course about the process of becoming a mother or a child.  I was particularly moved by the way her stories explore so thoroughly that uncertain space, both mentally and physically, in early pregnancy, pre-abortion, pre-miscarriage and conception as well as pre-motherhood and post motherhood.  When you think about it, it's a strange but very real place which almost all women experience one way or another, but I don't think it's ever been explored in quite this way.

Elizabeth and Polly busy signing books