In response to Andrea Askowitz’s 237-page complaint memoir called
My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, I’d like to propose
another book called I’ll Give You Something to Be Miserable
About.
In that book, the female protagonist would be
forced—no!—to work a paying job. She’d spend her pregnancy
worrying about saving money to pay the rent during her maternity leave.
She’d spend maternity leave rushing around researching day-care
centers.
Instead, as the book begins, Askowitz has been working an
all-volunteer job for some five years. Working while pregnant gets
rather inconvenient, so she quits the job shortly before the birth.
After the birth, she hires a helpful nanny (whose existence is
acknowledged only in the thank-you section after the end of the book,
along with her bicoastal writing groups).
Somewhere in there, she writes the book, in which she complains
about how hard it was to get inseminated (sperm bank, two tries) and
have a baby alone and as a lesbian, although all this solitude and
alienation turns out to rest on one hell of a support network of
family, friends, and, apparently, if you read between the whines,
independent wealth.
It is unfortunate that none of Askowitz’s supportive compatriots was
supportive enough to tell her to shut the hell up—or to wrestle
with the elephant of economics lounging in the middle of her book. What
promises to be a warts-and-all account of one woman’s struggle, instead
makes mock of the real, class-based travails of single parenthood. The
fact she thought she could write around money makes the book feel
deceitful. For the purposes of today’s lesson in Suffering 101, suffice
it to say that you can’t have your baby, your struggle memoir, and your
nanny, too.
