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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review originally published in "The Oregonian", November 8, 2009
This review is from: Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict (Paperback)
I'll say it now: Irene Vilar had fifteen abortions in fifteen years. That's the blunt opening one-liner that fails to tell the whole story of this beautiful and brave book. Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict is a memoir less about fifteen abortions than it is the story of a young woman who never got enough love.
At eight, Vilar watched her mother commit suicide by leaping out of a car. At twelve, she read The Diary of Anne Frank and felt scarred--not from the horror of the Holocaust, but because she so deeply understood the plight of a girl who lived in an attic and had to ask permission "to exist in that smallest of holes." At seventeen, far from her home and broken family in Puerto Rico, she began a sexual relationship with her fifty-one year old college professor that lasted eleven years.
In Impossible Motherhood Vilar does exactly what the best memoirists do: she tells us the truth about everything, even when the truth utterly confounds. How was it that she could allow herself to conceive unwanted pregnancies over and over again? What compelled her to pursue and eventually marry the domineering man who insisted that to be with him Vilar had to "endure the burden of freedom" by remaining childless, yet rather than get a vasectomy preferred to stand by while Vilar--who was not only painfully young, but often suicidally depressed--had abortion after abortion? In prose that's searchingly honest and gorgeously wrought, Vilar takes us into the depths of her psyche and family history, daring to tell a story that's unsettling and complex and ultimately redemptive.
It's when Vilar takes us most deeply into her story that Impossible Motherhood is most compelling, which is why I thought it unfortunate that the book opens with a foreward by the feminist writer Robin Morgan. There is nothing wrong with the foreward itself. The information Morgan presents about abortion and birth control and the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women is interesting and relevant and her insights about the personal struggles Vilar writes about in the book are moving and apt. But I couldn't help but think that Morgan's words were there to legitimize Vilar's, to acknowledge and head off readers squeamish about a story that in Vilar's words, "is a perversion of both maternal desire and abortion, framed by a lawful procedure that I abused."
Her story is perverse in the truest sense of the word--it deviates from what is accepted as good and reasonable. And she tells it to us with courage and grace and a true writer's skill. By memoir's end, Vilar has carried a pregnancy to term and birthed a daughter who she loves as fiercely as most mothers do. The baby's birth is an occasion of joy that's made all the more meaningful by what it means to Irene Vilar: that after so much sorrow, she found a way to be born anew.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Controversial Read, February 21, 2010
This review is from: Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict (Paperback)
Impossible Motherhood is the memoir of a woman who had fifteen abortions in fifteen years. Although many will find the author totally unsympathic, others will read her story and understand what motivated her. Irene Vilar lost her mother at age eight, when her mother opened the car door while the car was in motion, throwing herself out and killing herself in front of her child. Having learned from her mother that a female should be pleasing to others, Vilar stuffed down her feelings about this event and channeled her emotions into her schoolwork, succeeding to the point that she is accepted to college at age fifteen.
Leaving her family behind in Puerto Rico, Irene attends Syracuse University in the Northern part of the United States, an environment as different from Puerto Rico as is imaginable. At fifteen, she is left by her father at the college, knowing no one, with little money and little life experience. Her family experiences are bleak. Her father is an alchoholic, who cheats on all the women in his life. Two of her brothers are drug addicts. Vilar falls under the influence of a professor at the university and ends up staying with him for a dozen years. He is sixty years old when they meet, and Irene is sixteen. He insists on his freedom, never paying her way but insisting that she pay for her food, and half of any vacations, as well as paying him rent. Since a child would tie him down, he insists on no children. His basic rule was that he took but did not give back to anyone.
Irene's only rebellion, as she saw it, was forgetting to use her birth control. Her pregnancies were acts of rebellion against this overpowering influence, a way of asserting her independance. Yet after a month or two, the thought of losing him overwhelmed her, and she would abort another baby.
This book, although it is hard to read at times, is recommended for all women; feminists,women caught in dependant relationships that are bad for them, mothers who want to avoid their daughters falling into this trap as well as any woman ambivalent about abortion. Vilar's life story shows the dangers of giving up independance and control of your life to anyone else, of needing someone so badly that you rebel against your ideals. The reader is simultaneously repulsed by the fate of all these babies and compelled to read further to hear how Vilar overcame this life and all it entailed.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Women: You Owe It To Yourself to Read This Book..., February 2, 2010
This review is from: Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict (Paperback)
Somewhere shortly after I began to read Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar, I turned to the back to see if there was an author picture. Such a beautiful woman, but with large sad eyes, even in this photo. As I read about her marriage, I wanted to alternatively "shake" her for allowing her husband to treat her so, and then "hug" her tightly as her mother and/or grandmother should have.
There is no doubt that a young 15-year-old woman who begins an affair with a much older man is searching for "something." There is both an honest account of her life with her husband, as well as a follow-up analysis of what was happening to her. Even though she later separated from her husband and went into the same type of defeating relationship with another man, by that time, Irene was already addicted--to abortion as a means of control.
Irene places her life within her cultural background. This is most significant--and not so significant. A need for women to gain some control over their own life has been documented for all women, not just one culture. I must say though that the activities about using the women in Puerto Rico to test drugs are a devastating reality that we must never forget! When will the time come when profits for corporations are no longer more important than people?
Childhood for Irene included her mother leaving the home in her early years. Two of her brothers were drug addicts, one dying from his abuse. Her father was a quiet alcoholic and while he seemed to be "there" for the family, his loss of his wife deeply affected the entire family.
When Irene was 15, she was allowed to go to the United States to begin college. As an intelligent woman, but young enough to be "moldable," she became the mistress of her professor. I can think of no other words to describe him than as narcissistic and selfish! In essence, he wanted his freedom above all else, wanted Irene to financially carry her own weight and had no desire to have children, making that quite clear but forcing Irene to be the one to deal with birth control.
Thus began the cycle. Irene could become pregnant, because she wanted children, but would abort within the time allowed legally...only to ignore her birth control pills or take them sporadically, until she was once again pregnant.
It is arrogance beyond belief what her husband did "in support of his freedom!"
It is stupidity beyond belief to allow it to happen...unless there are psychological issues that press someone into this type of self-destructive behavior. Irene Vilar freely shares her innermost feelings about her husband and others in her life. Many women become stupid when faced with things they cannot control, including myself!
I am so thankful that women are beginning to open up about sexuality and its impact on their personal life. God alone knows how many women are facing some type of psychological issue/result from sexual-related issues; and there are few, if any, church-supported actions created to help women with the terrible abuse they face.
If you have the least feeling for women's issues in the United States and other countries, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It is not fiction; it is a reality that must be explored and discussed...YOU must discover this for yourself!
G. A. Bixler
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