Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood - Softcover

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

“An oddly sweet-and-sour but loving memoir about becoming a mother.”
- Dwight Garner, New York Times

“To write well in the mother-child arena, a person must understand that the essential condition of motherhood . . . is absurdity. Samuel Beckett could have come up with a great book on babies. Anne Enright has.”
- Judith Newman, New York Times Book Review

“Equal parts wryly analytical and wholeheartedly emotional. She is honest, funny and scandalously frank.”
- Dallas Morning News, Merritt Tierce

“[A] field guide to both the romance and reality of what it means to create and care for other humans, delivered by narration that evinces deep sincerity and the purest happiness.”
- The Dallas Morning News

“Anne Enright’s style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro’s; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s.”
- Colm Tóibín

“At once a memoir, a reference manual and a cautionary tale about the conflicting emotions of parenthood.... For those who’ve grown weary of hyped-up superparents and their relentless positivity, [Enright’s] candor is welcome.”
- More

“[Enright’s] first work of nonfiction, Making Babies is a collection of short essays, some of them stream of consciousness, that move chronologically through the landmarks of motherhood. She writes with brutal candor and irreverence about the things that the feel-good baby books don’t tell you....”
- Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal

“Winning and witty.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“Keenly observed and gorgeously written... one of the best books ever on the experience of being a mother. Because it’s an experience so many of us share, Enright’s fearless and funny inquiry into why motherhood feels the way it does is not only entertaining, it’s deeply consoling.”
- Boston Sunday Globe