Eleven Hours [Paperback]

Lore arrives at the hospital aloneno husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity wardherself on the verge of showingis patient with the young woman. She knows what its like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body.Childbirth, this uniquely female form of heroism, is rarely documented in our literature, and Ive never seen it rendered with the extraordinary insight, urgency, and potency ofQuietly, without the fanfare she is due,With exhilarating speed the wonderful Pamela Erens describes the stories of two women as one gives birth to her first child and the other tries to contain her fears around motherhood. Miraculously, in these few beautiful pages, we learn everything we need to know about these characters and their lives.Written with incredible clarity, the third novel from Erens (The book is fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth. So much so, that it makes that boy adventure aboard Herman Melville's Pequod almost seem like a Carnival cruise. . .?This[Erens]?transforms the commonplace into the captivating . . .?What if, instead of making tender youths watch The Miracle of Life in health class, risking numerous teenagers passing out on the linoleum, we regularly exposed them to honest narratives about the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth? . . . [This isErens describes this pain so honestly that its rawness is breathtaking. . . .Pamela Erens has given us a dream that becomes a nightmare and is restored again to dream, a vital, microcosmic, fundamental, riveting, distilled illumination of our most profound and misunderstood passage, the rite at which every reader can marvel: someone once did that for me.