Like parenthood, a translated text is often a co-creation. Through Christina MacSweeney’s translation, Barrera’s prose is clear-eyed and poetic. As Barrera confronts the physical and emotional aspects of her pregnancy, she collects insights from artists and literature––“Books with advice, books written by psychoanalysts, novels, poems, or essays by pregnant women”––creating a text that’s part-memoir, part-commonplace book.

Review forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books (5/21/22)

This book is for everyone. We all spend our earliest days in a womb, after all. And now, I feel humbled by just how much energy, force, and biological choreography it took to get me here. Barrera’s “baby diary” showcases how writing can be a keepsake, a way to document details so as to preserve a moment in time. Each observation felt so valuable, like a snapshot of something fleeting. I, personally, have not read enough about how it feels to be pregnant. How it feels to be a vessel for life. Barrera reveals just how transformative the experience really is.

Barrera also shows how writing about our truest experiences is a way to build community. While reading, I felt very connected to a chorus of voices from around the world. I felt I was discovering “a canon and a tradition” of mothers who choose to document their personal truths through their art, through their writing. I even felt inspired to write a baby diary of my own some day!

Guys…I read this so hungrily. I highlighted practically every page. I am very grateful that NetGalley let me preview an early copy of this book. It’ll be on shelves May 3rd and I couldn’t recommend it more.

This book was a slow start for me, as a mother to three small children, the author's observations were beautiful and true, but I wanted more. I found that in the second half of the book, when the author began to rely more on what others had written about motherhood, and tying those words to her lived experience. Wow! It's a veritable encyclopedia of what smart, thoughtful women writers have observed about the experience of motherhood. I'd by a copy just for that.