Coquitlam Public Library

The Motherhood Affidavits, A Memoir of Childbearing, Addiction, and Questionable Innocence

eng

no index present

non fiction

The Motherhood Affidavits

electronic resource

dictionaries

A Memoir of Childbearing, Addiction, and Questionable Innocence

A prodigious talent blazes onto the American literary scene with this bold, original memoir of her perilous-yet life-saving-addiction to childbearing With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug"-the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing-cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family-nearly to the point of collapse. Brilliantly crafted, impeccably written, intensely personal, The Motherhood Affidavits portrays a woman, a marriage, a family, caught in an impossible bind. It's heartbreaking resolution raises profound questions about whether we, as a society, are governed by morals or by laws-and whether either is an adequate measure of any one person's ability to parent and capacity for love

adult