Category: Book Excerpt

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Poetry is the way

This is a quote from Audre Lorde, from her essay called Poetry is not a Luxury.

Quote by Audre Lorde, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

Have you read any of Audre Lorde’s essays? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the same essay here.

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s “intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible” (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

Self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Copyright © 1977 by Audre Lorde (for this essay).

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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A special degree of familiarity

Excerpt from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Photo by Adam Chang on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

‘What are you going to call her?’ I asked, as the first sips of tea warmed me from the inside, and the tangle of emotions caught in my throat began to melt a little.

Oddball shrugged.

‘I don’t know, maybe Fly, or Tray.’

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t like it. Those names didn’t suit this Dog, considering her personal history. Something else would have to be thought up for her instead.

What a lack of imagination it is to have official first names and surnames. No one ever remembers them, they’re so divorced from the Person, and so banal that they don’t remind us of them at all. What’s more, each generation has its own trends, and suddenly everyone’s called Magdalena, Patryk, or – God forbid – Janina. That’s why I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person. I’m sure this is the right way to use language, rather than tossing about words stripped of all meaning. Oddball’s surname, for instance, is Świerszczyński – that’s what it says on his front door, with the letter ‘Ś’ in front of it. Is there really a first name that starts with the letter Ś? He has always introduced himself as ‘Świerszczyński’, but he can’t expect us to twist our tongues trying to pronounce it. I believe each of us sees the other Person in our own way, so we should give them the name we consider suitable and fitting. Thus we are polyonymous. We have as many names as the number of people with whom we interact. My name for Świerszczyński is Oddball, and I think it reflects his Attributes well.

But now, as I gazed at the Dog, the first thing that occurred to me was a human name, Marysia. Maybe because of the orphan in the classic children’s story – she was so emaciated.

‘She wouldn’t be called Marysia, would she?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ he replied. ‘Yes, I think that’s right. Her name’s Marysia.’

The naming of Big Foot occurred in a similar way. It was quite straightforward – it suggested itself to me when I saw his footprints in the snow. To begin with, Oddball had called him ‘Shaggy’, but then he borrowed ‘Big Foot’ from me. All it means is that I chose the right name for him.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t choose a suitable name for myself. I regard the one that’s written on my identity card as scandalously wrong and unfair – Janina. I think my real name is Emilia, or Joanna. Sometimes I think it’s something like Irmtrud too. Or Bellona. Or Medea.

Meanwhile Oddball avoids calling me by my name like the plague. That means something too. Somehow he always finds a way to address me as ‘you’.

‘Will you wait with me until they get here?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ I readily agreed, and realized I’d never have the courage to call him ‘Oddball’ to his face. When you’re such close neighbours, you don’t need names to address each other. Whenever I see him weeding his small garden as I’m passing by, I don’t need his name to speak to him. It’s a special degree of familiarity.

The name of the book comes from William Blake’s prose work called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in a section called the Proverbs of Hell, you can read it here.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

One of Poland’s most imaginative and lyrical writers, Olga Tokarczuk presents us with a detective story with a twist in DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD. After her two dogs go missing and members of the local hunting club are found murdered, teacher and animal rights activist Janina Duszejko becomes involved in the ensuing investigation. Part magic realism, part detective story, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD is suspenseful and entertaining reimagining of the genre interwoven with poignant and insightful commentaries on our perceptions of madness, marginalised people and animal rights.

Copyright © 2009 by Olga Tokarczuk.

Translated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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I never wanted to get married

This is a quote from the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

Quote by Sylvia Plath, “That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Bell Jar – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

Copyright © 1963 by Sylvia Plath.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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How does it feel to remember everything?

Excerpt from The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

Photo by Keith Chan on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.

“May I ask you something?” I said, still looking at him.

“Of course,” he answered.

“How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”

“That’s a difficult question,” he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.

“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”

“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”

“So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?”

“I’m not sure about everything. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”

“Different how?” I asked, rubbing my fingernails.

“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even as they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”

He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.

“I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,” I told him. “I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?”

“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.

I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”

“When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.”

“But you have to admit that it’s difficult to be a writer on this island. Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”

“If that’s true then I’m glad,” R said.

I turned my palms up and held them out. Then we stared at them for a time, without so much as blinking, as though I were actually holding something in my hands. But no matter how hard we looked, it was painfully clear that they were empty.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Memory Police – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

Copyright © 1994 by Yōko Ogawa.

Translated by: Stephen Snyder

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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We want to be remembered

This is a quote from the book Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Quote by Emily St. John Mandel, “First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we wanted to be remembered.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Station Eleven – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Copyright © 2015 by Emily St. John Mandel.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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You want to take real pictures

Excerpt from Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.

For a long time, this was the only image Mia had of Mr. Wilkinson, a mysterious cross between Marco Polo and Santa Claus who filled his home with treasures. But one afternoon, just after her thirteenth birthday, Mr. Wilkinson had called to her sternly from his front porch.

“I’ve been seeing you traipsing around for a year now,” he’d said. “I want to see what you’ve been up to.”

Mis, terrified, collected a stack of her photographs and brought them to the Wilkinsons’ the next morning. She had never shown her photos to anyone but Warren before, and Warren, of course, had oohed and aahed. But Mr. Wilkinson was an adult, a man, a man she barely knew. He would have no incentive to be kind.

When she rang the Wilkinsons’ doorbell, Mrs. Wilkinson led her into the den, where Mr. Wilkinson sat at a large desk typing something on a cream-colored typewriter. But when Mia entered, he swiveled around in his chair and swung the typewriter shelf down and under, where it folded into a cabinet in the desk as neatly as if it had been swallowed.

“Now then,” he said. He unfolded a pair of halfmoon glasses that hung around his neck and placed them on his nose, and Mia’s knees trembled. “Let’s have a look.”

Mr. Wilkinson, it turned out, was a photographer himself—though he preferred landscapes. “Don’t like shots with people in them,” he told her. “I’ll take a tree over a person any day.” When he went on a trip, he took his camera with him and always scheduled himself half a day to go exploring. From a file he pulled a stack of photographs: a redwood forest at dawn, a river snaking through a field shot with dew, a lake reflecting the sun in a glittering triangle that pointed to the woods beyond. The photographs all over the hallway, Mia realized, were his as well.

“You’ve got a good eye,” Mr. Wilkinson said at last. “Good eye and good instincts. See this one here?” He tapped the top picture, a photo of Warren perched in the low branches of a sycamore, back to the camera, silhouetted against the sky. “That’s a fine shot. How’d you know how to frame that?”

“I don’t know,” Mia admitted. “It just looked right.”

Mr. Wilkinson squinted at another. “Hold onto that. Trust your eyes. They see well.” He plucked out another photo. “But see this? You wanted that squirrel, didn’t you?” Mia nodded. It had been running along the ridge of the fence and she’d been mesmerized by the undulating arc its body and tail had traced as it ran. Like watching a ball bounce, she’d thought as she clicked the shutter. But the photo had come out blurry, focused on the fence instead of the squirrel, the squirrel itself simply a smudge. She wondered how Mr. Wilkinson knew.

“Thought so. You need a better camera. That one’s fine for a starter, or for birthday parties and Christmas. Not for you.” He went to the closet and rummaged in the back, the old overcoats and bagged dresses inside muffling his voice. “You—you want to take real pictures.” In a moment he returned and held out a compact box. “You need a real camera, not a toy.”

It was a Nikon F, a little silver-and-black thing, heavy and solid in her hands. Mia ran her fingers over the pebbled casing. “But I can’t take this.”

“I’m not giving it, I’m lending it. You want it or not?” Without waiting for her to answer, Mr. Wilkinson opened a drawer in his desk. “I’m not using that one anymore. Someone might as well.” He removed a black canister of film and tossed it to Mia. “Besides,” He said, “I’m looking forward to seeing what you do with it.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Little Fires Everywhere – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town – and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .

Copyright © 2017 by Celeste Ng.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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Crying was delicious

This is a quote from the story Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker.

Quote by Dorothy Parker, “To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from another story from Dorothy Parker here.

Collection of short stories – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Three brilliant tales by a master storyteller: ‘Big Blonde’, ‘The Sexes’ and ‘Dusk Before Fireworks’.

W. Somerset Maugham on Parker: ‘Dorothy Parker has a wonderfully delicate ear for human speech …. Her style is easy without being slipshod and cultivated without affectation. It is a perfect instrument for the display of her many-sided humour, her irony, her sarcasm, her tenderness, her pathos.’

Copyright © 1929 by Dorothy Parker.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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Adulthood’s full of ghosts

Excerpt from Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Photo by 戸山 神奈 on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

“These people you coach, do they ever actually change? I mean in any kind of lasting, notable way?”

He hesitated. This was actually something he’d wondered about.

“They change their behaviors,” he said, “some of them. Often people will simply have no idea that they’re perceived as needing improvement in a certain area, but then they see the report…”

She nodded. “You differentiate between changing people and changing behaviors, then.”

“Of course.”

“Here’s the thing,” Dahlia said. “I’ll bet you can coach Dan, and probably he’ll exhibit a turnaround of sorts, he’ll improve in concrete areas, but eh’ll still be a joyless bastard.”

“A joyless…”

“No, wait, don’t write that down. Let me rephrase that. Okay, let’s say he’ll change a little, probably if you coach him, but he’ll still be a successful-but-unhappy person who works until nine p.m. every night because he’s got a terrible marriage and doesn’t want to go home, and don’t ask how I know that, everyone knows when you’ve got a terrible marriage, it’s like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it’s obvious. And you know, I’m reaching here, but I’m talking about someone who just seems like he wishes he’d done something different with his life, I mean really actually almost anything—is this too much?”

“No. Please, go on.”

“Okay, I love my job, and I’m not just saying that because my boss is going to see my interview comments, which by the way I don’t believe he won’t be able to tell who said what, anonymous or not. But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think—this will maybe sound weird—it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front-row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite—”

“I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.”

“You don’t think he likes his job, then.”

“Correct,” she said, “but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. “Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?”

“No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?”

”No, please elaborate.”

“Okay, say you go into the break room,” she said, “and a couple people you like are there, say someone’s telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone’s so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don’t know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that’s what happens to your life.”

“Right,” Clark said. He was filled in that moment with an inexpressible longing. The previous day eh’d gone into the break room and spent five minutes laughing at a colleague’s impression of a Daily Show bit.

“That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re like sleepwalkers,” she said, “and nothing ever jolts them awake.”

He go through the rest of the interview, shook her hand, walked out through the vaulted lobby of the Graybar Building to Lexington Avenue. The air was cold but he longed to be outside, away from other people. He took a long and circuitous route, veering two avenues east to the relative quiet of Second Avenue.

He was thinking of the book, and thinking of what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arther seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V? Because he had been sleepwalking Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he’d jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them—I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge—and also he wanted to call every target of every 360° report and apologize to them too, because it’s an awful thing to appear in someone else’s report, he saw that now, it’s an awful thing to be the target.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Station Eleven – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Copyright © 2015 by Emily St. John Mandel.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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We don’t know

This is a quote from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.

Quote by Yōko Ogawa, “Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn’t afraid to say “we don’t know.” For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn’t have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Copyright © 2003 by Yōko Ogawa.

Translated by: Stephen Snyder

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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You oughtn’t to see this

Excerpt from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Photo by Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

‘Fine, fine,’ he said to me. ‘There’s somebody about to have a baby this minute.’

At the door of the delivery room stood a thin, stoop-shouldered medical student Buddy knew.

‘Hello, Will,’ Buddy said. ‘Who’s on the job?’

‘I am,’ Will said gloomily, and I noticed little drops of sweat beading his high pale forehead. ‘I am, and it’s my first.’

Buddy told me Will was a third-year man and had to deliver eight babies before he could graduate.

Then he noticed a bustle at the far end of the hall and some men in lime-green coats and skull-caps and a few nurses came moving towards us in a ragged procession wheeling a trolley with a big white lump on it.

‘You oughtn’t to see this,’ Will muttered in my ear. ‘You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.’

Buddy and I laughed, and then Buddy shook Will’s hand and we all went into the room.

I was so struck by the sight of the table where they were lifting the woman I didn’t say a word. It looked like some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups sticking up in mid-air at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn’t make out properly at the other.

Buddy and I stood together by the window, a few feet away from the woman, where we had a perfect view.

The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this unhuman whooing noise.

Latter Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had ay pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind. doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

The head doctor who was supervising Will, kept saying to the woman, ‘Push down, Mrs Tomolillo, push down, that’s a good girl, push down,’ and finally through the split, shaven place between her legs, lurid with disinfectant I saw a dark fuzzy thing appear.

‘The baby’s head,’ Buddy whispered under cover of the woman’s groans.

But the baby’s head stuck for some reason, and the doctor told Will he’d have to make a cut. I heard the scissors close on the woman’s skin like cloth and the blood began to run down – a fierce, bright red. Then all at once the baby seemed to pop out into Will’s hands, the colour of a blue plum and floured with white stuff and streaked with blood, and Will kept saying, ‘I’m going to drop it, I’m going to drop it, I’m going to drop it,’ in a terrified voice.

‘No, you’re not,’ the doctor said, and took the baby out of Will’s hands and started massaging it, and the blue colour went away and the baby started to cry in a lorn, croaky voice and I could see it was a boy.

The first thing that baby did was pee in the doctor’s face. I told Buddy later I didn’t see how that was possible, but he said it was quite possible, though unusual, to see something like that happen.

As soon as the baby was born the people in the room divided up into two groups, the nurses typing a metal dog-tag on the baby’s wrist and swabbing its eyes with cotton on the end of stick and wrapping it up and putting it in a canvas-sided cot, while the doctor and Will started sewing up the woman’s cut with a needle and long thread.

I think someone said, ‘It’s a boy, Mrs Tomolillo,’ but the woman didn’t answer or raise her head.

‘Well, how was it?’ Buddy asked with a satisfied expression as we walked across the green quadrangle to his room.

‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘I could see something like that every day.’

I didn’t feel up to asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake.

I had always imagine myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over – dead white, of course, with no make-up and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Bell Jar – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

Copyright © 1963 by Sylvia Plath.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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