A conversation with Elisa Albert

How did the idea for your book originate?

I reread Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” after having had a child, and saw for the first time that it’s about postpartum derangement. That had never occurred to me when I read it as a teenager: it wasn’t taught that way, and in the edition I have, neither the scholarly foreword nor the afterword sees fit to make any mention of the narrator’s references to her baby. It was right around my first anniversary of motherhood, and as I began to get my bearings, I went looking for answers from literature. The postpartum experience holds me very much in thrall. It’s not at all dissimilar to the time surrounding death: periods of profound change and transformation that demand our complete attention. Life is distilled in those periods, ties are tested, and we are defined by how we deal, or don’t. We ignore or minimize this stuff at our own spiritual peril.

How do you see After Birth fitting into the larger literature of childbirth or motherhood?

I hope it will continue the conversation and serve as a reminder that this conversation needs to be had, that it will be had, come hell or high water, in spite of all the forces that conspire to silence women (not least of which can be, alas, women ourselves). The very fact that we tend to see motherhood as somehow not “universal” is problematic and creepy, given that every single one of us was given birth to.

But go to your local bookstore and look in the Pregnancy/Parenthood section and you’ll likely see an embarrassingly scant shelf with a handful of how-to books. What to Expect, Potty Training for Dummies—all those exhaustive owners’ manuals. That stuff is not sufficient, it’s artless, and it grossly ignores the metaphysical. We are not “only” mothers. We are literate and hungry and perceptive. We need more and better. Why isn’t that section stuffed to the gills with Alicia Ostriker, Adrienne Rich, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Jennifer Senior, Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg, Anne Roiphe, Lionel Shriver, Alice Notley, Lucille Clifton, Brenda Shaughnessy, Paula Bomer, Sharon Olds, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jayne Anne Phillips, Elena Ferrante, John Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, Ayun Haliday, and on and on and on? I want to imagine a world in which we become mothers with huge, layered webs of stories and poems supporting and encouraging and empowering us, rooting us in the certainty that we are not alone, we needn’t be afraid, and there is good work to be done.

After Birth’s jacket says “childbirth and new motherhood are as high stakes…as any combat zone.”

We have a vast and “important” literature of war, the life-or-death experiences of boys becoming men within the framework of that rite of passage. But birth has for so long been shrouded in secrecy, shame, and silence, all of which are profoundly harmful. We are often encouraged to compartmentalize and disown our births, as if they don’t matter, as if being alive at the end of the process is the only thing that matters. Imagine floating that kind of idea to a soldier just back from combat. Pretty backward thinking, no? We don’t honor birth, we pretend it doesn’t matter how we give birth, and in so doing we make a rather sorry mess of the experience for ourselves, our sisters, our daughters. Let’s own up to that, finally, and pay closer attention. A lot is at stake.

Editorial Reviews