Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Henry Holt and Company was kind enough to send me an ARE of Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After back in April of 2017, and in my (never-ending) quest to move through my piles of books, I finished it on Monday. And–wow.

Wow.

If you’ve ever born a child, you know that there are certain books that you absolutely SHOULD NOT read pregnant, not because they aren’t powerful and incredibly worthwhile, but because some vicarious emotional journeys should only be undertaken when you’re in an emotionally stable place yourself.
Happiness is most definitely one of those books. It’s well-written and gripping and draws you into Heather and her family’s world–the world of a family whose oldest child, a child somewhere between toddler and preschooler, needs and ultimately receives a bone marrow transplant. Gracie needs this transplant because she is born with a condition that her doctors can’t actually manage to diagnose, a condition where her red blood cells deteriorate and she needs a blood transfusion every 3-4 weeks. In the meantime, Gracie’s father, who initially told Heather that he wasn’t prepared to actually be a father in any real sense, undergoes an unexpected (to him) emotional transformation, becoming (once again) a vital part of Heather and Gracie’s lives. As a reader, you share those lives in a painful way, from newborn blood transfusions (it is NO JOKE to get a needle into those tiny veins) to pre- and post-transplant drugs and their side effects. They watch other children in the transplant unit struggle; they are very much aware when some of them die. It is a complex emotional journey that held me spellbound–and would have sent me over the edge when I was pregnant or caring for a newborn of my own, because what if? WHAT IF?

In my current stage of life, however–my youngest being 5–I am comfortably past the newborn worries (while entering into the adolescent ones). I found Heather Harpham’s memoir to be compulsively readable and entirely engrossing without being personally stressful. (The only aspect of it that I struggled with was her increasing use of the F-word. I appreciate that she was under a kind of strain that I have yet to even imagine, but I still find it personally jarring.) If you are safely past the pregnancy and newborn stage of life, this is a memoir you will never, ever forget. If you’re not, well–you may want to put it on a TBR list for the future.