The Bookshop Blogger #15
J.E's advice for those with buns in the oven doesn't come from the cookery section.
Sunday, 23 May 2010, 7:40 PM
My daughter is in her mid twenties and is of a quite focused career bent. Her friends, however, are not and seem, en masse, to have decided that it’s time to spawn.
I’m being a bit mean but there does seem to be a hive mentality. Her friend, whom I shall call Joanna because that’s her name, is the Queen Bee of their little group and when she got engaged several of her friends got engaged too. They were all married within months and now that Joanna has got pregnant - lo and behold - the rest of them seem to be following suit!
It’s interesting how the pendulum has swung. My older two are both in their thirties, and they and their friends are only just settling into their long term relationships, let alone thinking about having children. Good for them - I started far too early! But then, it was the eighties, and we were told that if you didn’t give birth by the age of thirty you’d shrivel, or some such nonsense, but now we have lots of books on the subject. They’re even split into categories. In fact, if you start in the Self Help Section of your local book shop, by the time you’ve found your way to the till you could have met and fallen in love with your perfect partner (Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear Guide To…Lasting Love: How to Create a Superb Relationship For Life) and dealt with any lingering doubts regarding their or your physical viability for reproduction by picking up a copy of Jorge Chavarro’s (et al) The Fertility Diet.
Now that you’ve found your man and fed him up so that he’s as fertile as possible, grab a copy of Your Pregnancy Week by Week by Lesley Regan, finish off with a copy of Unusual Baby Names: from Apple, Brooklyn and Chevy to Xanthe, Yorick and Zafira by Paddington Baher and Stewart Ferris and you are more or less ready to check into the Maternity Ward.
Do you know, I have completely lost track of why I started writing about this. As I said, virtually all of my daughter’s friends are pregnant and she wanted an idea for a present that wasn’t a bunch of flowers or whatever. She wanted a book, so clearly she came to her mother. Now I told you that her friends have this hive mentality but they are still bright, intelligent girls and, for the most part, married to bright and intelligent men so I recommended Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood by Naomi Wolf for him and Night of the Living Dad by Sam Delany for her. I think it’s quite important that both parties have a very clear idea of what’s going on with the other one.
Paddington Baher. Poor sod.
Next time, I’ll tell you about the bookseller’s equivalent of hidden treasure down the back of the sofa.
