Best for:
Any woman with friends. Any woman who has had kids. Any woman who has friends who have had kids. But a content note that there is a lot of discussion around birth trauma and also post-natal depression.
In a nutshell:
The ‘Little Women’ are four friends who met at university. One (Lauren) has an infant child, one (Nicki) is eight months pregnant, one (Charlotte) has been dealing with infertility for years, and one (Steffi) is childfree by choice. They gather for Nicki’s baby shower, and it apparently ends in literal flames.
Worth quoting:
“I’ve seen enough of my friends go from happy to mess to know they’re not alone, but you can’t really say, ‘if it helps any, everyone I know who’s had a baby seems to have ruined their lives?’”
“My body ripples with irritation that’s laced with guilt, which is pretty much how I always feel around my mother.”
“The path does not seem worth it to me. I can see, now, why mothers judge me so harshly. It has to be worth it, in their heads, because their sacrifice has been so huge and it’s so never-ending.”
Why I chose it:
Saw it in a bookstore and it looked like something I’d enjoy, especially as the token childfree person whose friends are nearly all parents now.
Review:
Another book I basically inhaled. I started it before bed on a Wednesday, then read it on my lunch break on Thursday and finished in after dinner that same night. So good.
The book is set up a bit like Liane Moriarty’s “Big Little Lies” in that we start at the end, where we learn that a gender reveal firework has burned down a house and scorched land. In turn, at the start of different sections of the book, we get snippets of interviews of the four main characters to hear what happened. The majority of the book takes place on the day of Nicki’s baby shower, which Charlotte is throwing, with occasional flashbacks to help us understand where some of the tension in the friend group comes from.
Lauren is suffering as a mother. She’s exhausted, she doesn’t feel supported by her husband, and her child will. Not. Sleep. Nicki is very pregnant and very uncomfortable, and isn’t super keen on the baby shower but going along with it. Charlotte has thrown her soul into throwing the shower, possibly as a way to distract from her own fertility issues. Steffi has just launched her own tiny book agency and is representing an author who is about to make it big. The shower is a bit inconvenient for her as she’d rather be working, but she shows up anyway.
Most of the characters are so well developed, but I knew pretty early on that the author was a mother, because the one character (Steffi) who does not have and does not want children is the least developed. She does get some inner thoughts that resonate – the fact that when it’s something like a wedding or baby shower everyone shows up, but when it’s something like an amazing work accomplishment no one really cares as much even if that’s what is as important to her. Her friends do think she’s a bit selfish, and not capable of caring, which is what childfree folks hear literally all the time.
And I did appreciate the author had at least one of the people who want kids comment snarkily about how no one cares that Steffi is childfree, so she should shut up about it. Which, as someone who is not having kids I can assure you is not the case. We hear endlessly about parents, and hear from mothers that our concerns about the support we get in life is irrelevant. It’s shitty, because despite the declining birth rate and the utter lack of support for mothers, society still doesn’t seem to know what to do with us. I was saying to a friend that I would have loved this book even more if perhaps Bourne had collaborated with someone who is childfree to further develop Steffi’s character.
With all that said, I still really loved this book, and am recommending it to others I know because I do think it captures much of what my friends with children have shared with me about their experiences over the years.