Mommy Lit and Medicalized Birth

By Joanne Rendell
Web Exclusive - September 22, 2008

Over the last few years, the publishing industry has given birth to a new genre: mommy lit. Jennifer Weiner's Little Earthquakes, Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic and Baby, Jane Green's Babyville, Emily Giffin's Something Blue, and Risa Green's Notes from the Underbelly (to name a few) have arrived in bookstores with their glossy covers and tales of pregnancy and contemporary motherhood.

Whether the authors like it or not, their books have been given the moniker mommy lit—usually by reviewers who see such works as an offshoot of the 1990s' phenomenon, chick lit. Lizzie Skurnick made the connection clear in her New York Times article, "Chick Lit, the Sequel: Yummy Mummy". Skurnick argues in her piece that the new outcrop of mommy lit books take the 20-something heroines of chick lit past (think, Bridget Jones) and show them "settled down with Mr. Right" and swapping "their stilettos for Bugaboo strollers."

Such generalizations about the new genre are to be expected. After all, mommy lit's foremother chick lit was often stereotyped as shoe-obsessed, materialistic fluff. In her introduction to the polemically titled short story collection, This is Not Chick Lit, Elizabeth Merrick went as far as to say chick lit "numbs our senses" and "reduces the complexity of human experience."

It wasn't surprising that mommy lit would face similar attacks. It wasn't surprising either that these attacks are often ill-founded, just as they were with chick lit. Some chick lit did depict women buying shoes or "20-something singles" yearning for Mr. Right. However, not all chick lit did this. For example, one the most popular chick lit authors, Jennifer Weiner, debuted with Good in Bed, a book about a plus-sized heroine learning to live with and love her weight. Jane Green did something similar in her bestselling novel, Jemima J. Even Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary, often seen as the chick lit prototype, was not as one-dimensional as reviewers have sometimes made it out to be. The novel is a clever play on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as well as an original and funny portrayal of life as a 30-something single woman.

In spite of the variations and richness of the genre, reviewers had fun stereotyping chick lit as vacuous fluff. Reviewers have had similar fun with mommy lit. Popular blogger, City Mama, boiled down the mommy lit formula to the following:

First, start with one thirty-something, Jewish or WASP, NY/NY area, former-high- powered-job-having mother. Add some meddling grandparents, a bitchy, non-child-having best friend, and a nice (usually slightly hippified) best friend.

Make sure two to three pages cover guilt mom feels for going back to work coupled with realization that dad does the stay-at-home-thing better.

[...] Make sure at least one page is devoted to describing the closet full of size six or eight designer clothes into which mom no longer fits.

Sometimes mommy lit books do indeed have these features. Jennifer Weiner's Little Earthquakes has a meddling mother-in-law and a character trying to juggle her high-powered career with new motherhood. In Notes from the Underbelly, Risa Green's protagonist has a bitchy best friend who is described as having "no life outside of work" and who doesn't understand "this obsessive need of everyone to procreate."

But mommy lit, at least in my reading of the genre, seems much more nuanced, rich, and varied than these depictions allow. There are stories of desperately trying to get pregnant (Babyville), stories of women loosing babies to SIDS (Little Earthquakes), stories about women getting pregnant with men who want nothing to do with them (Something Blue), or husbands cheating on wives who have just given birth (Little Earthquakes). Even Shopaholic and Baby, which is consciously and ironically more frivolous and materialistic, still deals with very real issues such as the insecurities women face during pregnancy.

To generalize about the kind of stories mommy lit tells is to be ill-informed. It is also another sign of the way books for, about, and by women are too often the object of ridicule or dismissed as escapist fluff.

However, this is not to say all is perfect with the genre. One unfortunate trend within mommy lit is the portrayal of childbirth, which in almost all cases is a highly medicalized affair. C-sections, fetal monitoring, epidurals, and obstetricians abound. And when natural birth is mentioned, it is nearly always portrayed as an option which never works or is the birthing choice of kooky celebrities.