Little Labors (Rivka Galchen, 2015)

Little Labors is a collection of essaylets and observatory notes on how becoming the mother of a newborn changes you. I knew this going in, but as I had seen it described as a “pregnancy novel” I at first thought it was meant to be fiction. Anyway, having myself recently become a parent, this book was of interest to me. Galchen writes in a quite unusual style, or maybe it is usual for the MFA writing set that she belongs to, I’m not sure. It does remind me of the style of Ben Lerner, though. After having read the short book I noticed that her bio passingly mentions that she, in addition to being a writer, is also a physician. That annoyed me a little bit.

Galchen calls the first months of the baby “the puma period”, where she likens the as yet immobile infant to a puma. When the kid begins to locomote, she evolves into a chicken. Other animal similes are also used. One memorable passage is when the book discusses colour trends in baby apparel, and that at the time of her baby’s first months, the in-colour was orange (which, incidentally (or not) also is the colour of the cover of the book).

Several parts of these 100 or pages are about being a woman and a writer. Galchen lists a bunch of female writers and how old they were when their first books were published. Elsewhere she notes how many of them had children, and if they did, the number of children. She returns to discussions of 16th century Japanese manuscripts like Tales of the Genji and the Pillow Book several times over. Also, the word “ronin” keeps coming up.

There is an anecdote about preparing a passport for her 8 week old baby where everything goes wrong. In the end, the head of the photo is a few millimeters too small. Weirdly, the exact same premise is repeated in a book I started directly after this one, Ali Smith’s “Autumn”, where the main character tries to renew her passport and after a lot of hoopla is finally told that in the photo she provided, her head is a few millimeters short. This must be a regular occurence.

I kept thinking, “yea this is an apt description of a situation I find myself in as a new parent”, and that I would share it with my spouse – but I hardly remember any of them now. Calling the kid a puma is the one thing that stuck. Oh, yeah, she writes a lot of being sleep-deprived. And people’s reactions to her baby as she walks down the street. Some are amused, some not.