it's only interesting when it's happening to me!!
Rivka Galchen's Little Labors is 7 x 4.5 x 0.6 inches & 136 pages.
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I hope this isn’t because these words rhyme, but the whole time I was reading Little Labors I kept thinking: ambitious; suspicious… ambitious… suspicious… and mostly suspicious.
Ambitiously, Little Labors takes Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book as its inspiration for format and tone. Has there been a book with more impeccable format and tone than Pillow Book? Probably not! Never before, never since.
For subject, Little Labors takes on: being a mother to a baby. That’s not suspicious immediately, not at all!, but the writer readily admits that she had very little interest in literature about mothers and babies until she was a mother to a baby. It’s a tricky position, because if you’re not interested in a situation unless it’s happening to you, you’re perhaps ill-suited to calibrate what is interesting in general.
Now now now, as an attitudinal position, I admire being like: things are boring unless they’re happening to me! It’s selfish, which is a fun quality for like, a character in a novel. But as an attitudinal position in short-but-sweeping essays about babies in art and babies in literature, it does engender some mistrust in this viewpoint.
HOWEVER, I found three thought-experiment-larks in Little Labors pretty intriguing! Here they are:
1. Since the invention of IVF, for the first time, the child-bearing person might have questionable parentage of the baby (akin to the sperm-provider). What a drama that would bring up!
2. What drug is a baby? I was talking to a pregnant friend a few weeks ago, who said she felt like the in-utero baby was a tranquilizer.
3. A maxim to revive: so that we can continue to respect and project upon them, perhaps children should again be seen not heard.