Laura Jean Baker has written a beautiful and brave memoir of motherhood and its discontents, which are indistinguishable from its joys.
This is a warmly intimate yet intellectually provocative personal document of originality and considerable charm.
--Joyce Carol Oates With the birth of her first child, soon-to-be professor Laura Jean Baker finds herself electrified by oxytocin, the love hormone--the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression.
Over the next eight years, her oxy cravings, and her family, only grow--to the dismay of her husband, Ryan, a freelance public defender.
As her reckless baby-making threatens her family's middle-class existence, Baker identifies more and more with Ryan's legal clients, often drug-addled fellow citizens of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Is she any less desperate for her next fix? Baker is in an impossible bind: The same drive that sustains her endangers her family; the cure is also the disease.
She explores this all-too-human paradox by threading her story through those of her local counterparts who've run afoul of the law--like Rob Mc Nally, the lovable junkie who keeps resurfacing in Ryan's life.
As Baker vividly reports on their alleged crimes--theft, kidnapping, opioid abuse, and even murder--she unerringly conjures tenderness for the accused, yet increasingly questions her own innocence.
Baker's ruthless self-interrogation makes this her personal affidavit--her sworn statement, made for public record if not a court of law.
With a wrenching ending that compels us to ask whether Baker has fallen from maternal grace, this is an extraordinary addition to the literature of motherhood.
| Bind | The same drive that sustains her endangers her family |
|---|
128.00 Lei
