Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces

This book isn’t about perfect moments with your infant. It doesn’t dispense sensible advice or proscribe schedules to manage the lawless days and nights of early maternity. Instead, this literary think piece, an Eat, Pray Love for the smarter mommy crowd, seesaws from disaster to delight, horror to grim resignation, much like motherhood itself. An antigen to the anodyne, mother-knows-least tone of such cordially hated tomes as What to Expect in the First Year, Fresh Hell answers Dorothy Parker’s question— ”What fresh hell is this?”—in exhaustive detail. Fifty-two spare meditations, one for each week of baby’s first year, cover subjects from baby poop to more baby poop, breastfeeding and its relation to same, broken nights and endless days, and all the other low points of having a baby. Thankfully, the book’s raw prose reminds frantic and time-strapped new moms that their brains are only temporarily on vacation. And its moments of poetry assure them that the madness they experience is intermittently divine.