Now My Heart Is Full

May 15, 2018
A too self-indulgent memoir in which the writer shows how the birth of a daughter changed her life and her relationship with her own long-dead mother.June, a staff writer for New York magazine who frequently writes on issues related to parenting, tells the story of her own experiences as a parent, beginning with the decision at age 35, to have a baby. She shares with the reader details of the pregnancy, the Caesarian delivery, the emotional roller coaster of early parenthood, the loneliness of the new mother. She is clearly fascinated by her own life as a mother and with her developing daughter, Zelda, and she is an especially aware mother. What makes this account different from "let-me-tell-you-what-an-amazing child-I have" baby books is the revelations about June's mother, an alcoholic, whose alcoholism early on became the defining factor of June's life. Her mother's disease became the author's secret and introduced her to a life of secrets and lies. Her look back at her growing-up years with an alcoholic mother, which makes up a significant portion of the book, is straightforward and has the ring of accuracy. Becoming a mother changed June's life in more ways than first-time motherhood inevitably does. It opened her up to a social world she had not known, and it allowed her to form family connections she had not had before. New mothers, especially stay-at-home ones, may be enthralled by this story and find that a private life made public is just the thing to brighten and lighten their own suddenly restricted lives. Less engaged readers may see this memoir as a trip not worth taking.If nonfiction can be considered chick lit, this one deserves the label.

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June 1, 2018
Immediately after June gave birth to her daughter, a thought elbowed its way from her post-delivery haze: she wished her mother was there. At the time, June's mother had been dead from complications related to alcoholism for several years and effectively out of June's life for the same reason for much longer. Contemplating her most proximate losses and gains, June braids baby Zelda's arrival?so welcome, so disrupting?and stories of her own childhood and her relationship with her mother, which seems to still be evolving. In her nonlinear narrative, June tackles both the instructive, such as making rules and routines for Zelda that free them both, and the revelatory, those thoughts of her mother and her mother's illness that appeared in the new creative space that becoming Zelda's mom opened for her and begged to be put, however painfully, on the page. Warm, wrenching, and full of light, June's first book joins a spate of recent memoirs by new mothers that includes Meaghan O'Connell's And Now We Have Everything (2018) and Jessica Friedman's Things That Helped (2018).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)