Motherhood Affidavits A Memoir

A prodigious talent blazes onto the American literary scene with this shattering memoir of her perilous--yet life-saving--addiction to childbearing

With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug"--the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing--cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's drug-addled clients than with their middleclass peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family--nearly to the point of collapse.

Brilliantly crafted, impeccably written, intensely personal, The Motherhood Affidavits portrays a woman, a marriage, a family, caught in an impossible bind. Its heartbreaking resolution raises profound questions about whether we, as a society, are governed by morals or by laws--and whether either is an adequate measure of any one person's ability to parent and capacity for love.