Eleanor Henderson

The basics: Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon, brings together an impressive group of contemporary female writers from a variety of genres to share their experiences giving birth. The essays are as varied as the women who write them.

My thoughts: Admittedly, before I got pregnant (and even early on in my pregnancy), I shied away from birth stories. Rarely do I favor ignorance, but in this case, I was scared of labor and show more childbirth, yet I knew I would be going through it, and I wasn't ready to deal with it. At some point in my pregnancy, I became eager for birth stories. I'm still frightened, of course, but I find comfort in imagining myself in a variety of different scenarios, both the positive and negative.

I'll be honest: this collection of essays often veers to the negative and sad. There are some heart-breaking stories told in these pages. I shed many, many tears as I read, yet even the most heart-breaking essays, I found a sense of comfort and kinship with the writers. These strong, beautiful voices moved me with their tales of the times before, during and after birth. To combine such intimate details about life, birth, and new motherhood with beautiful language is a true gift.

Favorite passage: "I suppose we are always alone in our pain, but we are rarely positioned appropriately to view the isolation accurately. Most of the choices with which we are presented in childbirth are secondary to the one most important in practice we must be prepared to labor alone, even in the company of others, even with the brilliantly blinding help of loved ones. Perhaps the debates regarding child birth are so he did because in the end it’s one woman’s experience, not a shared cultural phenomenon. It’s you and your pain; it’s you and it’s your baby.” --Sarah A. Strickley

The verdict: This collection is superb. While some essays are objectively better than others, only one rang hollow for me. While I connected more deeply with some than others, I appreciated and gained something from each one. I'll be giving this book to many, many pregnant friends in the years to come. show less

The Twelve-Mile Straight is all about secrets, more secrets than you can shake a stick at. Folks might expect there would be some secrets when Elma Jesup delivered two babies, one white and one black. The scandal is compounded by a rape accusation and the lynching of a black field hand named Genus Jackson by a mob that was led in part by Juke Jesup, Elma’s father, and Fred Wilson, the grandson of the local seigneur (mill owner and land owner) upon whom everyone is financially show more dependent.

This is also the story of a lifelong friendship between Elma, the sharecropper’s daughter, and Nan, the daughter of a former field hand Sterling who left long ago and his wife Ketty who was friends with Elma’s mother and who took care of Elma when her mother died in childbirth. These two grew up as close as sisters. It’s a bond that ties them together and which leads them to carry on with the secrets.

This is a southern gothic novel so it will be stewed in racial horrors, economic injustices, and corruption. There will be violence, sexual assault, and Jim Crow will wave his blood flag all over. There is one thing that rings false, though. It’s 1931, the lynch mob is all white, the field hand is black, yet somehow the young man flees afraid of prosecution for murder. That is so unlikely. One of the benefits of Jim Crow was impunity. Add the economic levers his grandfather wielded and her has more than impunity.

I think The Twelve-Mile Straight is beautifully written. Henderson enriches the story with powerful visual imagery and writes for all the senses, with details that evoke the sights, sounds, smells, flavors, and feeling of the time and place. Most of the characters are morally complex. Even those we might perceive as evil have flashes of decency and those we might perceive as heroic their flaws and weaknesses. The great strength of this book, though, is the writing. Henderson has this oblique way of dropping information so her sentences just sidle up to you and unload these explosive revelations as they pass by, looking all innocent. It’s really quite remarkable and worth reading for that alone…and when you get a character like Nan and even Elma, on top of it…you’ve hit the jackpot.

The Twelve-Mile Straight was released yesterday. I was provided an e-galley for review by the publisher through Edelweiss.

The Twelve-Mile Straight at Harper Collins
Eleanor Henderson author site

★★★★
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/9780062422088 show less

Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints is a subtle novel that could simplistically be described with a key theme of growing up but actually delves into so much more should the reader opt to do so. Jude, Eliza and Johnny are three kids who are just playing at being grown-up and mature. They put on a good front, but underneath, their feelings of loneliness and loss bring them together. The overwhelming air of sadness that permeates the novel only adds to each character's melancholy and show more struggle to face reality. Ms. Henderson masterfully weaves the rebellion and loss that defines much of the novel in such a way that the end result is a story that ends on a note of hope - that even the most depressed, lost and lonely person can find love, acceptance, and happiness.

Ten Thousand Saints is reminscient of Less Than Zero with its huge focus on the drug and punk scene. Interestingly, socio-economic backgrounds provide no indication of whether one will be drawn into the drug scene. More importantly, while "straight edge" is the opposite of the drug scene, it is still a form of rebellion against society. All three characters are driven to action by the fear of the truth and anger at their respective parent(s). While their reasons differ, the end result is still a group of young adults who hide rather than face reality. Death - past, immediate, and future - along with birth - past and future - become the driving force behind each character's metamorphasis into adulthood. Hiding behind the "scene" rather than confronting the truth is one key coping mechanism.

The narrator, Steven Kaplan, provides an understated performance that works well with the highly dramatic lives of the three protagonists. The differences in his portrayal of each character are subtle and yet effective as the differences in each character, outside of the obvious gender differences, are just as nuanced. This is one novel where added tension and drama is not necessary, and Mr. Kaplan avoids adding extraneous emotion to each character, playing up the boredom and lack of concern each character is trying so desperately to portray to the world. Mr. Kaplan's simple approach to the narration of Ten Thousand Saints allows Ms. Henderson's characters to speak for themselves.

In its storytelling, Ten Thousand Saints is poetic in its simplicity while unflinching in its harsh portrayal of addicts of all kinds. Human redemption stands alongside human depravity to offer a brutally realistic and yet beautiful story of love and its power to save.

Thank you to Beth Harper from Harper Audio for my review copy! show less

So I'm six months pregnant and getting tired of reading blah prose about pregnancy and birth. I was really excited to find a book of essays about childbirth by great writers. Finally! A pregnancy book the English major in me can sink her teeth into (really the English major in me should say, "into which she can sink her teeth").

Now, I liked this book for the quality of the writing, but I'm going to say that I sort of regret reading it. If you're a pregnant lady trying to prepare for an show more unmedicated home birth (as I am), this is not the book for you. Many of the stories are horrifying. My last midwife appointment was full of me relating stories from this book and Shari assuring me, "That's very rare." It's almost impossible to shelter yourself from negative birth stories nowadays, but you certainly don't have to read this book and freak yourself out. So many of the stories start with some version of, "I really wanted to have an unmedicated birth," and end with epidurals, c-sections, and various traumas. Even though Ina May Gaskin's books are hardly poetry, they are meant to get to you to a place where you believe you can have an awesome birth.

To be fair, I know that these stories are all true and they are not all scary. Still, if you were about to take your first trip on an airplane, would you want to read a bunch of stories describing traumatic airplane trips that didn't go as planned? Probably not. Better to read it after safely landing at your destination.

I may alter my three-star rating after giving birth. There are some really great essays in here. I particularly liked Cheryl Strayed's, Gina Zucker's and Susan Burton's, but they are all worthwhile. show less