Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy

From the author of a Guardian memoir of the year 2022

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to read something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn't find one.

So, she wrote Expecting.

Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the reader on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one's life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective that are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.

Ramaswamy bears witness to the experience of pregnancy in an intimate yet expansive book of lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.