Exploring abortion at 14, her rocky relationship with her mother Alice Walker, and the ecstasy of bearing a child at 37, the content of Rebecca Walker's memoir provides fertile ground for this probing interview.Writer Rebecca Walker knew at the age of 20 that she wanted to have a baby. While traveling in Africa, she had a vision of herself mothering a child with a man she encountered there, but she pushed it aside. She continued to push her maternal longings aside for fifteen years until meeting her current partner Glen, who encouraged her to follow her heart. She recounts this journey in Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence (Riverhead). Now the 37-year-old mother of two-year-old son Tenzin wants to let young women know that being ambivalent about having kids can be costly.
Exploring everything from her abortion at age 14 to her conflicted feelings towards the child she adopted with her female partner, Walker takes readers intimately inside every stage of her pregnancy and painful birth. Along the way, she also details her relationship with her mother, feminist writer Alice Walker, which that grows increasingly fraught as her pregnancy progresses. Pinning her personal journey to a broader cultural paradigm of women putting off parenting until "the time is right," Walker, also the author of Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (Riverhead, 2001) and editor of What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future (Riverhead, 2004), sees her book as providing advice she wished she knew while making this most important decision.
Rachel Kramer Bussel: The book is written in diary form, taking you through the very earliest stages of your pregnancy through birth. Is it culled from actual diary entries? When was the book actually written?
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