Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2020
From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind
Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy,
and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with
human reproduction.
Women play all the time with the great power that's been conferred upon
us: it's fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking
around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will
turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you're fifteen, the idea is
fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you're
thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.
Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk
at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru's most
dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in
the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she
looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a
precipitous peak.
With a scientist's curiosity and a libertine's unbridled imagination,
Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation
she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how
pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or
exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don't
prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking
up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to
navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant
woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision.
While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political
battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener
defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness,
Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces
all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species.
