This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood by Vicki Forman
Publisher: Houghton Miflin Harcourt
I received this novel direct from the author. Thank you Vicki!
About the book: Vicki Forman gave birth to Evan and Ellie, weighing just a pound at birth, at twenty-three weeks’ gestation. During the delivery she begged the doctors to "let her babies go" — she knew all too well that at twenty-three weeks they could very well die and, if they survived, they would face a high risk of permanent disabilities. However, California law demanded resuscitation. Her daughter died just four days later; her son survived and was indeed multiply disabled: blind, nonverbal, and dependent on a feeding tube.
This Lovely Life tells, with brilliant intensity, of what became of the Forman family after the birth of the twins — the harrowing medical interventions and ethical considerations involving the sanctity of life and death. In the end, the longdelayed first steps of a five-year-old child will seem like the fist-pumping stuff of a triumph narrative. Forman’s intelligent voice gives a sensitive, nuanced rendering of her guilt, her anger, and her eventual acceptance in this portrait of a mother’s fierce love for her children. (from Barnes and Noble website)
About the author: VICKI FORMAN’s work has appeared in the Seneca Review and the Santa Monica Review as well as in the anthologies Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, This Day: Diaries from American Women, and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined. She lives in La Canada, California.
This Lovely Life
Publisher/Publication Date: Houghton Miflin Harcourt, July 23, 2009
ISBN: 9780547232751
263 pages
