There is a theme from Ellen’s first book that I’ve been clutching close to my heart since I first read it, maybe six years ago (?), as we worked together on What You Become In Flight (Melville House, 2020). And here it is, again, on the page—but in a very different form.
It’s about finding meaning in work, both care work and professional work. In the clear-eyed way Ellen always sees people, and calls their invisible work to your attention, she writes that the central role the women in her family have performed and continue to perform has more meaning than anything else in the world. Ellen was writing about being a daughter, dancer, writer. Her reflections on motherhood and work have changed since her memoir; she knows the texture of each of the experiences in in a different way. But, like all of her books and essays, there is a tremendous sense of resilience and humor. For instance: It’s simple to write when you have a newborn. “Write when the baby writes,” she jokes.
If you think Ellen’s first novel about childbirth makes any part of parenthood look easy, think again. “Giving birth shaped my experience of early motherhood as a time of brutality and fear,” she wrote in a review of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleichman is in Trouble for Time. As an editor friend of mine texted me, “This book is destroying me in all of the right ways!!”
There is something deeply healing about Ellen’s empathy, her writing style that is always sensitive, sharp, and delicate. The word that comes to mind is accurate. This is a book you’ll find yourself nodding along to, whether it’s the specific challenges of IVF, childbirth, and parenthood, or just the trouble of living in a body and also in the world.
Let’s please take a minute to celebrate what a superstar Ellen is, and also how hard she is working, and how much resilience it can take to push through to publication. Especially when you are writing something urgent, maybe dark, maybe a subject close to you. But at last—it’s here!
Ellen is an incredible combination of a strong writer, tireless educator, advocate for her students and other writers, community builder, and lucky for all of us—an exceptional writer of both nonfiction and fiction.
Four years ago, we worked on her debut novel, Book of Hours, which was just published by Dzanc in this beautiful package.
It’s a birth story, and not an easy one, that gives the narrator a strange sense of time as she meditates, reflects, very literally labors over how much pain women are meant to hold; what pain means in religious terms, sociological terms, what the limits of your own body may be. The saints of her childhood come back to her, and she thinks about the women who have become mothers before her. Finally, in my favorite stretch of the book, she reflects on wanting more: more time with your partner, more time with your child, more time to work. The push and pull of work and family have always been a central tension in her work, and this is a perfect reflection of how far she can take those themes.
In an interview with Vogue, she said,
“When I think about what justice means in a delivery room, I think it means autonomy. It means listening to a patient. It means minimizing things that might feel upsetting or violent while a woman or birthing person is going through an incredibly intense, life-changing, physically altering circumstance that’s really scary. And so, in a way, that feels like justice. I think part of what made me know that I could write about this is that it would be another way to advocate for women.”
Went to the bookstore to buy a copy of Book of Hours for a friend on pub day, and walked out with Famous Men by Julie Buntin and Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins. All recommended. (The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw too, which came out shortly thereafter—she and Ellen would be great in conversation about faith, motherhood, and moving from small presses to big ones. Someone in publicity, please make this happen.) Anyone who loved Meaghan O’Connell’s birth story might really dig this book.
