Customer Reviews

Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a new mom, I loved this book. It beautifully described the changes and upheavals that becoming a mother has brought to my life. While I wasn't on depressants, I too had a difficult pregnancy which I'm still coping with emotionally and physically. I too was on a variety of medications throughout the pregnancy. But the depression and medication worries are only a small part of the story in this book. If you're looking for Prozac Diaries part II as one reviewer seems to have, you're looking in the wrong place.

I too have never known that I could love this deeply, that a single smile from my baby girl would be worth more than anything I've done in my 38 years. No other writer has come close to describing the way I feel as if every molecule in my body has been rearranged. In particular her comment "Fatherhood is something you do, Motherhood is something you are" struck me. I've been fundamentally changed in so many ways that I never expected and ironically, I don't even care. I read the book thinking, "Wow! Someone has decribed how exactly how I feel and now I don't have to do it myself." She's written the book I wished I could but in prose that's so much more beautiful than anything I could have mustered.

I don't understand the reviewers who criticized her so much. Perhaps it was a father who was offended by how much the father was left out of her story. This was a story of the emotional changes involved in becoming a mother who struggled with some of the difficulties that no one tells you about.

Lastly, several of her observations have stayed with me. Like the thought that pregnancy should carry a warning label. As she points out, with all it's side effects, if it were a drug the FDA would classify it as highly dangerous. And the information that fetal cells remain in a woman's body for her entire life... parts of each child remain part of her physically in addition to emotionally ... explains so much to me now as a new mom.

I've been buying it for all my pregnant friends and new moms and we've all loved it and found it remarkable.

I've enjoyed other works of Lauren Slater, and this was no exception. It takes courage to write about the experiences she's had emotionally. Especially when it involves being heartfelt and honest about the giant step of having a baby.

Anyone who is pregnant or plans to become pregnant should read this book regardless of whether or not you have a history with depression or other mental illnesses. Many of the feelings and emotions Ms. Slater expresses about having a baby are ones that many women have, but are not honest enough to express. Reading about her experiences and emotions authenticates just how serious a choice having a baby is, not just for someone with mental illness, but for every responsible couple.

This is a good, informative and honest piece of writing. I would recommend it highly to anyone who wants an emotional look at what it's like to be pregnant. Ms. Slater is an excellent writer in both her use of imagery and emotion.

Slater's book offers:

a) an account of one woman's experience "crossing over" into Motherland.
b) her frank soul-searching about how to (and if one should) merge motherhood with mental illness (something which more than 1 in 5 Americans suffer with.)
c) an artful, beautifully worded style -- gratefully devoured by those seeking alternatives to cutesy-tootsie, sterile, soul-less, "What to Expect..." manuals.

Regarding the reviewer who complained that there was no answer to the book's title, let me just ask this: Were you REALLY expecting an answer? I don't think anyone can diagram how love works...

If you're expecting "answers" for the universal questions of life, try Wittgenstein.

If you're looking for specific questions about labor/birth/delivery/ -- buy the Unofficial Guide to Pregnancy.

But if you're interested in reading a moving account of one person's spiritual and personal journey into parenthood, this book is a winner.

Lauren Slater approaches the question of what it is to come to love a child, and how one struggles with all the questions and fears that come up as you embark on that unknown journey with a raw and deep honesty that I have found difficult to find in any other books dealing with becoming a mother. This book is a love letter of sorts to her daughter yet to be. It is a confessional at times, of all the dark fears and shortcomings each mother must face. Lastly, it is a testimony to the process of love as a form of growth and evolution, something that is complex, alive, and ever changing. I have read this book twice. Each time I come away from it in tears and deeply moved. As a psychotherapist and woman myself, I recommend it to any woman who has questions about whether she can become a mother and if she has the capacity in her to love another in such a deep and vulnerable way. It is beautiful book.

I thought Ms. Slater's account of becoming a mother and the things that goes through one's mind was right on target. Although I could not relate to the mental illness side of the story nor the luxury of having an in-house nanny, I can totally relate to the questioning of how one falls in love with their new baby. I've often felt slightly guilty when I remember the first time I saw my first born and didn't feel automatically "connected". It does take time to develop the relationship and fall in love and it is about time somebody acknowledges it.

Love Works Like This written by Lauren Slater is a memoir starting nearly at conception and ending at Eva's first birthday. Throughout the book, Slater ponders how good of a mother she can be with her mental illness getting in the way and whether or not she should actually keep the baby. I picked up this piece as a young woman who feared all the troubles and complications of bearing a child and rearing it and it explained to me that this can be different for everyone, but that the experience is definitely worth having. I would suggest this book to those who have had children, so that they may reflect on their own personal experiences, to those who are interested in the experience itself, and to those who are experiencing it now.
The style of the book is written by certain days where Slater believed the content of the day was worth mentioning. She states in the beginning of the book that it should not be read as a diary but a travelogue. Occasionally, there are short entries within the book that simply state, "Still sane." This is a central focus of the book of Slater enduring her mental illness and taking her medications. There is this underlying sense that she worries for Eva within her and what could happen to her at the cost of keeping her own mind sound. Slater's voice is easily readable and works like a consciousness, sometimes flitting from topic to topic, and becoming easily distracted, paranoid even.
The book starts out with Slater peeing in a cup and finding out that she is positive for being pregnant and ends with a letter to Eva on her first birthday. I believe that Slater wanted the story to be about her relationship with Eva more than anyone else, starting with finding the first traces of life within her body rather than having sex with Jacob and then finding out. With the final letter to Eva it feels like the whole book was meant for her to read when she grew much older.
Certain entries left me wondering where on earth she was going with the ideas and even laughing when I finally made the connection but some parts I grew lost and confused. I found myself asking `who says that?' Certain things she writes makes her story come alive with her meandering thought process and uncanny dialogue. At a point she drops some quotes that I'm not sure really helped the story but she also includes emails to and from someone she met online which really cemented her relationship with Eva and helped her come to terms that someone somewhere else was experiencing the same issues she faced.
Love Works Like This was an excellent read where I found myself laughing and sympathizing with Lauren Slater. I definitely learned a lot from her story. Even though you may fear the experience and doubt yourself while experiencing it you develop a love for something that you yourself created with your partner.

presents the challenges of living daily with depression, and attemps to answer the questions regarding pregnancy and raising children while monitoring your meds, etc. and still meeting their needs...all while dealing with your creative bursts and encouraging theirs...a rewarding and very worthwhile task with rich rewards...

Lauren Slater is a highly gifted writer--her writing is eloquent, descriptive, and fluid. So this book is a pleasure to read just to experience her giftedness with language. She has a sense of humor and frankly and acknowledges a complicated constellation of emotions around her pregnancy and subsequent childbirth, (including ambivalence, anxiety, guilt) and the process of the unfolding attachment and love she comes to feel for her baby. The lengthy, difficult labor may be hard for some moms-to-be to read about, but again I appreciated its frankness--so many moms say they forget the difficulties of labor. I liked it that the author gives herself and the reader permission to feel ambivalent about pregnancy and motherhood.

I first read an excerpt of this book in Nell Casey's (ed.) book on writers and depression called "Unholy Ghost" and was extremely moved by Slater's ability to convey the stirring emotions of impending motherhood while still keeping her tone un-sappy and grounded.

She formats this book into a series of "journal entries" although at the beginning she acknowledges that it is not a literal outpouring of her actual journals, rather formatted as such to be more of a "travel guide" through the journey she takes through motherhood. I appreciated that note -- it helped me not discount the whole book as being annoyingly contrived.

Even mothers / people who have not struggled with depression and medications may find this book hearteningly honest although some may not appreciate or understand her perspectives. She has an almost poetic way of expressing the part of her life that has struggled through depression, and ultimately triumphs over self-doubt and her illness to begin her path toward motherhood. Interesting and inspiring overall.

Lauren Slater is one of the finest contemporary writers, male or female, alive today. She brings her history as a psychiatrist and a survivor of mental illness to everything she writes in terms of compassion, intelligence, and a fierce honesty. As it happens, we share the same literary agent and I was approached to read the galleys. Magnificent. In fact I was somewhat mortified at how much more I enjoyed her book than my own (The Zygote Chronicles) - and my jacket quote reflects my awe for her talent as well as this marvelous, spare, brilliant journey into motherhood. I have also read Welcome To My Country by Ms. Slater and was struck by its genius. A writer's writer, and now a mother, too. Congratulations to a great woman.