Nine Months
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A bold, unapologetic first novel about a pregnant mother and wife who abandons her family in search of an identity that is hers alone.
"Deliciously, dangerously rogue." —Marcy Dermansky, author of Bad Marie
Sonia, a young Brooklyn mother shaken by her unexpected (third) pregnancy, abandons her husband and kids and takes off on a cross-country odyssey in search of an identity separate from her family. She does everything a pregnant woman shouldn't do—engaging in casual sex and smoking weed—as she retraces her past and attempts to reclaim her sidelined career as an artist. Nine Months is a fierce, daring page-turner of a novel—a lacerating response to the culture of mommy blogs, helicopter parents and "parental correctness" as well as an unflinching look at the choices women face when trying to balance art and family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bomer's debut novel (after the short story collection, Baby & Other Stories) is an interior account of one woman's experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Sonia is an artist, or at least she was, until her full-time identity became that of wife and mother. Content with her kind and supportive husband, Dick, and her two young boys who are finally old enough to allow her to think about painting again, Sonia is plagued by the fear that the life she is living is smaller than the life she once imagined for herself. When she finds out she's pregnant for a third time, these feelings of being trapped by her own nest are exacerbated, and Sonia is driven to one final journey of self-discovery. Sonia's inner and outer turmoil is graphically rendered, and the novel is characterized by raw emotion and humanity that mirrors the wrenching experience of motherhood. Bomer revisits the same tropes of death and loss in childbirth that characterize her short fiction, with the same ability to appall. This is an alarmingly genuine account of the emotions that accompany that most primal act of giving birth and raising children.