Read this: Knock Yourself Up

I just finished reading Louise Sloan's Knock Yourself Up: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom and highly recommend it if anyone's at all thinking about that.



She's got some excerpts up on her site (and for those authors out there looking for models to build your own professional author site, her main site, lousesloan.com, is an excellent example. There are also TOTALLY CUTE baby photos, including some of her son with a birthday cupcake! I mean, really, the cuteness is too much. Sloan's doing a reading next Wednesday (so am I, at Rant Rhapsody, or I'd totally go):

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, Manhattan:

Group Reading for Charity, Barnes & Noble Greenwich Village
with Sue Shapiro, Ian Frazier, Alec Wilkinson & Kimberlee Auerbach
a percentage of book sales benefits Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen
Time: 7 pm
Location: 396 Sixth Ave. at 8th St.
Cost: Free!

Below is part of the publisher's blurb about the book:

Louise Sloan was ready to have kids at age 28—but her partner wasn’t. Ten years later, after yet another birthday and yet another breakup, she realized she’d better get serious about single motherhood, before her fertility ran out. So began a heartbreaking and hilarious journey that led her to cyberstalking an anonymous sperm donor, running around town with liquid nitrogen tanks full of semen, being mistaken for a horse breeder, nearly getting another girl pregnant—and finally, to being called Mom.

In Knock Yourself Up, you’ll learn what it’s really like to go through the process of becoming a single mother by choice, from the women who’ve done it. From exploding semen vials to shocked parents to sex and dating while artificially inseminating, Sloan candidly shares her experiences and those of 43 other women.

And there's a great Q&A with her at The Urban Muse:

You've gotten some strong reactions from a lot of readers. How do you handle criticism?
L: Oh, yeah! The reactions to my salon.com Q&A were surprisingly mean, and just today I saw a thread on a right-wing website that was even meaner! They actually posted a picture of me when I was pregnant (taken from my book website)--I think it was meant to illustrate that I'm so ugly that of COURSE I had to knock myself up. When I was writing the book, I was totally freaked out by the prospect of criticism. I woke up many mornings with a stomachache at 5 am, feeling uncomfortable about the vulnerability I was exposing in my writing, and afraid of the right-wing bashing I knew I was gonna get and (worse) fearful of snarky, bad reviews and personal attacks from mainstream media. It was pretty awful inside my mind those early mornings, actually. But I thought, you know, I set out to write this and if I focus on protecting myself, the book won't be as good. So I just have to ignore my many fears and insecurities and just try to write this as well as I can.

My review:

Knock Yourself Up is a fascinating, helpful guide to the wide world of single motherhood, as told by the funny and thorough Louise Sloan. I'm 32, and while not yet ready to take the plunge, I wanted to learn more about what might potentially be in my future. There are a lot of issues Sloan disucsses that I'd never considered, such as donor complications, talking to your child about where they came from, and the actual ins and outs of getting pregnant via artificial insemination (the image of the nitrogen tank will certainly stay with me!), and information about things like the Sibling Donor Registry, by which siblings of a given sperm donor can find each other.

To her credit, Sloan shares plenty of her story about being a single lesbian, fresh from a breakup, going through the insemination process solo in order to have her son, Scott, both the highs (taking her son to swing dance class!) and lows (dealing with hemorraghing at the hospital alone, for one). But having the perspectives of so many other women, including their horror and success stories, is what makes this book so valuable. The interviewees talk about everything from the intersection of race, stereotypes, and single parenthood, to how they're perceived by potential dates, neighbors, and peers, the positives of being on their own as well as the loneliness and pitfalls.

The title may be pithy and punchy, but the stories and issues included in Knock Yourself Up let women know that becoming a single mom is doable, but isn't a piece of cake by any means. In some ways, Sloan is a cheerleader for single motherhood, encouraging other women who think they can and want to do it to go for it, but she also very carefully lays out the costs, risks, and cons right along with the pros. From sex and dating as a pregnant woman and single mom, to dealing with well-meaning but often out-to-lunch family members and friends, as well as birthing options and more, this book offers plenty of food for thought for potential moms, especially what to look out for when it comes to choosing a donor, having a support system, and health concerns.

The fact that Sloan found so many of her interviewees via the group Single Mothers by Choice, and the camaraderie many of the women talk about sharing with that group, is comforting. I found the fact that Sex and the City got mentioned multiple times here a bit strange, though perhaps it's simply now a code for living a relatively posh, single city girl lifestyle, as contrasted with one's life as a single mom. Various kinds of single motherhood (from one child to multiple) are put forth here, along with an excellent resource guide for more information. This is an excellent book which I plan to consult again if and when the time comes that I decide to become a single mom.