Book #1: No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood edited by Henriette Mantel

I read about this book on Brain Pickings and it sounded interesting.  I'm the worst for bookmarking webpages then never checking them out again, but I've gone through them again in service of this project, so here we go.  First book of 2015.

Well, it was an inauspicious start.  The book...sucked.  I'd say half of the essays were engaging and relatable, at least to me, as a 36-year-old child-free lady.  The other were, well, defensive.  Way more defensive than I probably should have anticipated.  On one hand, I get it.  I've heard all the ignorant things people say and, yeah, I'm tired of it too.  But on the other hand, the women who are child-free by choice should be proud and positive about it, at least I think.  Maybe I'm a little Pollyanna about the whole topic.  I chose around 19 not to have kids and everyone in my close circle is 100% OK with it; it's acquaintances (mostly older ones) who take issue.  I guess I don't really care that they do; all sorts of people have opinions about my life, and that's fine with me.

An odd thing I noticed throughout the book was the anti-abortion undercurrent.  There were a few women who owned up to the procedure in their essays, some apologetically, some daring me to judge.  But the more bitter among the writers seemed to have an attitude about women who have had abortions. I read more than once that this was about a women's right to choose, and I DON'T mean abortion.  Like, chill out, sister.  It's likely that people reading this book are pretty chill on the topic.  You don't need to sneer.

The worst part of the book, though, was the lousy copy editing.  One writer has an "exiting" life.  One wrote of "loosing" her virginity.  Sometimes books have typos, yes, but I've never before had an urge to write to a publisher and deliver the same news I do to my 9th-graders every time they turn in essays: "Spellcheck doesn't catch everything."  When done well, copy editing is invisible.  When done poorly, it's unbearably distracting, and it took me out of the book every single time.  I even tried to convince myself that no, that woman's life really is exiting; I must be reading the sentence wrong.  No, I wasn't.  This woman wasn't exiting shit but a life tethered to offspring.  I also had a momentary fantasy of loosing my virginity upon the world, allowing it to wreak havoc upon Tokyo.  The concept seemed empowering but unlikely.

I dog-eared the authors I liked (oh, the horror, I know, dog-earing a library book; I cop to it) and sought out other work by them.  None of them have had books published, at least none that are in my local library.  The book wasn't impressive enough for me to spend actual money on Amazon, so I didn't check there.  Maybe there are other empowering anti-breeding treatises out there, but this book left me exiting the genre and loosing its hold on me.