Great Expectations Ed 2

In this exceptional collection of original essays, twenty-five celebrated writers share one of their most intimate and life-changing experiences: giving birth. Moving, uniquely honest, and transformative, Great Expectations takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey like no other: Lynn Coady relates the painful memory of her teenage pregnancy and the anguish of having to give up her newborn for adoption; Peter Behrens expresses a fathers feeling of utter helplessness and incomparable joy during the birth of his first child; Christy Ann Conlin describes pregnancy and birth at age forty; Afua Cooper reflects upon the immigrants experience of three pregnancies and childbirths in a new land with foreign, and evolving, customs; Anne Fleming contemplates her partners artificial insemination and the birth of a beautiful girl; and Jaclyn Moriarty transcribes her grandmothers and her mothers birth stories, along with her own, to create a tender oral history spanning three generations.