What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Alice Eve Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 9, 2009

A personal and medical odyssey beyond anything most women would believe possible

At age forty-four, Alice Eve Cohen was happy for the first time in years. After a difficult divorce, she was engaged to an inspiring man, joyfully raising her adopted daughter, and her career was blossoming. Alice tells her fiancé that she's never been happier. And then the stomach pains begin.

In her unflinchingly honest and ruefully witty voice, Alice nimbly carries us through her metamorphosis from a woman who has come to terms with infertility to one who struggles to love a heartbeat found in her womb - six months into a high-risk pregnancy.

What I Thought I Knew is a page-turner filled with vivid characters, humor, and many surprises and twists of fate. With the suspense of a thriller and the intimacy of a diary, Cohen describes her unexpected journey through doubt, a broken medical system, and the hotly contested terrain of motherhood and family in today's society. Timely and compelling, What I Thought I Knew will capture readers of memoirs such as Eat, Pray, Love; The Glass Castle; and A Three Dog Life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this chronicle of a late-in-life pregnancy, New York City playwright and theater artist Cohen recalls an unlikely chain of events that, at age 44, transformed her life: "Three weeks ago I found out I was pregnant. Two weeks ago, I contemplated and rejected a late-term abortion. One week ago I was put on bed rest. I accepted my role as a miniature hospital, protecting a fragile life by lying on my left side and drinking Gatorade." Already the mother of an adopted daughter, Cohen's first experience with pregnancy is a minefield of physical and financial dangers: "A woman with no prenatal care for twenty-six weeks is a lousy insurance risk... To an obstetrician, she represents an expensive malpractice liability." Cohen questions herself-health, commitment and emotional readiness-and others while sorting through a growing mountain of advice, ultimately wondering whether one can ever be fully prepared to bring a baby into the world. Compelling, humanizing, and deeply honest, Cohen's narrative will get readers rooting for her growing family.
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About the Author

Alice Eve Cohen is a playwright, solo theater artist, and memoirist. She has written for Nickelodeon and PBS and received fellowships and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at The New School in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (July 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670020958
• ISBN-13: 978-0670020959
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #682,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put it down, July 10, 2009

By 

Amy Tiemann "creator of www.MojoMom.com" (North Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Alice Eve Cohen draws on her skills as a one-woman show performer and storyteller to write a harrowing, moving, searingly honest memoir about the chaos that took over her settled life at age 44 when, after experiencing health problems and told she was menopausal and infertile, she discovered that she was actually six months pregnant.

I do not want to reveal too much about what happens next, because a reader should experience the story unfolding page by page, as Alice is told new "certainties" that are dashed again and again. "What I Thought I Knew" is the perfect title for this memoir, and Alice writes out ever-evolving lists of her own feelings, what her doctors have told her about her condition, and her baby's prognosis.

Nothing goes as planned, and Alice suffers ambivalence, guilt, and crippling depression. As a memoirist, Cohen shares her feelings with spare, unadorned honesty. Can she survive this experience? Can she be a mother to this child? What makes a mother? A good mother? She explores these questions directly, in simple, often poetic prose.

I am not usually a huge fan of memoir and what is being called "confessional journalism," but Cohen breaks through any reservations I have about personal narrative. Once I started, I didn't want to put the book down, so I read it in one evening. What differentiates Cohen's writing for me is that she does not use distancing techniques of irony or snark. She is incredibly straightforward and pulls us into her experience, sharing her most intimate experiences in a way that illuminates the choice to enter motherhood, along with family dynamics, depression, the fallibility of the medical system, the value of community and professional support, and ultimately, the mystery of grace.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!, July 13, 2009

By 

Sharon (Gaithersburg, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (Hardcover)

What a fabulous book. It was so well written! Alice was so brave to re-live everything she went through in order to share her experience with us. I would love to read a follow up, part 2 in about fifteen years. As a DES Daughter, and never blessed with children, I can share in the fact that it would have been wonderful at thirty to find out I was pregnant. At forty-five and six months pregnant, not so much.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Alice in Wonderlandesque story about a woman's conception conundrum, October 1, 2010

By 

Julee Rudolf "book snob" (Oak Harbor, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Imagine you are a 44-year old woman who, after engaging in behaviors and enduring procedures best avoided during pregnancy and taking medicines known to cause harm to fetuses, learns that, against all odds, has conceived! Such is the long story short version of the situation a divorced, engaged, mother-of-one woman found herself in in 1999. In What I Thought I Knew, Alice Eve Cohen recounts how it all came about, what went down, and her struggles with the related moral and ethical issues. The author makes no bones about her ambivalence about the baby. And while her honesty is admirable, her actions during the latter part of her pregnancy are disturbing as is her litigiousness. Admittedly, it's easy for the insured to judge. One wonders, though, what the child feels about all this. Ultimately, what turns out to be the best of the story is also the worst (brutal honesty), and what would make it, I believe, a good pick for a book club. Better: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso, Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery, and Leaving Mother Lake by Yang Erche Namu.