This review originally appeared on my personal blog, Christie Thinks
The basic premise of this book was entirely fascinating to me: an examination of the identity of adult women who do not have children. In fact, I wrote my research paper for an online lifespan development class on the adult female identity, which certainly involves being or not being a mother. Unfortunately, my understanding of Melanie Notkin’s Otherhood
was all too broad. As it turns out, Notkin wrote her second book for an extremely narrow group of people: single or married women who live in New York City and who are at least in their late 30s (but likely early 40s) and want to have children but are unable to do so.
I find the discussion around women and motherhood fascinating: I am a 28-year-old married woman amongst many married female friends. The vast majority of those friends already have at least one child, if not two. Although my husband and I will probably be parents at some point, we have never discussed parenting as though it were a for sure thing; rather, it was an “if” instead of a “when”. I was hoping, therefore, that Notkin’s book would be an invitation to discuss the issue of motherhood in a broad sense , even if it didn’t address my very specific experience.
My first critique is mostly due to my expectations for this book. I anticipated that it would be full of statistics and research about motherhood and the identity of women. Unfortunately, that was not the case in this book. I think that Otherhood would greatly benefit from a lot more psychological content in place of the innumerable girls’ night out rants with Notkin’s glamorous, successful friends. I appreciate the candid-ness with which Notkin discusses her (and her friends) issues with fertility; however, I never felt like I was reading a book written by someone with anything beyond personal experience. I do think that personal experience is totally valuable (and I do not wish to de-value Notkin’s life experiences), but I would have been more comfortable with the amount of personal anecdotes if this book had come across as a more autobiographical work.
A fairly large portion of the book is dedicated to a discussion of IVF (in vitro fertilization) as an option for women who are struggling to get pregnant. Although this is a valid means by which to become pregnant if facing fertility challenges, a) IVF is extremely costly–around $10,000, and b) adoption was almost never mentioned as a means by which to become a mother. These things, combined with the constant girls’ nights out in NYC resulted in Notkin’s book coming off as very exclusive. To clarify: even if I were a woman in my early 40s attempting to get pregnant, I imagine I would feel a member of the out crowd, unable to discuss my fertility woes at a fancy NYC restaurant over glasses of expensive wine.
Moreover, there are a number of instances in the book in which Notkin and her friends fall prey to outdated and what I believe to be unhelpful gender stereotypes. Namely, that men are supposed to behave in a certain way when dating because they are men, and they need to be more manly men. For example, one of Notkin’s girlfriends reports that she is
“[V]ery grateful for all the things feminism enabled for our generation. But as women began to act more like men and men began to act more like women, we began to meet in the middle and now have no desire for each other anymore.” (33)
Assuming that there should be clear roles in a relationship that are defined by one’s gender is something I thought we had left behind in the 1960s. Knowing Notkin’s publisher (Seal Press), I had hoped that this book would be a lot more feminist in nature.
I did appreciate Notkin’s affirming the value of women, regardless of whether or not they have children. I also really appreciate Notkin’s Savvy Auntie movement (which she discusses throughout the book), as I believe that family and friends play a huge and important role in loving and raising their nieces, nephews, and friend’s children.
My feelings towards this book may be largely influenced by my not being an unmarried, early 40s women in NYC who wants to have children, but I still find this book to be lacking something. Maybe it is lacking research and seriousness, maybe it is lacking breadth of audience, or maybe it just has too much Melanie Notkin horn-tooting for my liking. Unfortunately, the only situation in which I would recommend this book is if I happened to have a good friend in her early 40s struggling with her fertility or singleness in respect to having children. Even then, I might just take her out for a long conversation over coffee instead.
* Full disclosure: I received an advance reader’s copy of Otherhood, but the above thoughts and opinions are fully my own. Also, there are Amazon Associate links included in this post. If you click through to Amazon, any purchase you make supports this site.
* Image source.
Important note: In no way did I tend to start a pattern of reading “The Bone _____” books. Ha.
In the past few years, some of my favourite books have been those which were suggested to be primarily by someone saying, “read it; just trust me”. Generally, this phrase comes up when the premise is just too weird to sell a book. For example: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor involves monsters and the slow collection of human teeth. The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater is about a magical horse death race into the sea. Neither of these descriptions gets an immediate affirmative from me, but I loved both of these books immensely.
Christie Reads 
