With short-form fiction or graphic novels, it's so quick, and ephemeral. It feels like they go by in the blink of an eye and I'm on to the next one, and I don't retain enough to write good reviews. In fact, just a few days ago, I gave myself permission to stop trying to write reviews of books of short stories. (This doesn't mean that I won't try to still write reviews of old science fiction stories - those are different, in that I'm reading them with purpose, and take my time to fit them into what I know and what I don't know yet, about the field.) But for anthologies? I can read them and let them be quick and transitory. That's okay.
I feel a great sense of relief. I may eventually make the same decision about graphic novels - I never feel like I have much to write about them. I mean, look at the two and a half paragraphs I've used so far to avoid talking about this specific book!
It's partly because this was loaned to me by a friend, and it was evidently a book she responded to strongly, and I just haven't had the same reaction. It's not a bad book, per se, it's just so bloody straightforward - it feels like a pamphlet on infertility was extended to graphic novel length. There isn't anything here that makes it more than a straightforward recounting, I don't see anything that makes it feel like art, like it becomes more than just a set of "this is what happened" events. I mean, except for the drawings, which are fine, but didn't strike me in any strong way.
It's so hard when my reaction is so much at variance with that of a friend who loaned it to me expecting, I think, a certain response.
Part of that is different life experiences. Neither of us have ever had children. I don't think she ever wanted to, and from what she's said, it sounds like she's gotten grief from plenty of people over the years who make her feel less a person because she isn't a mother.
My experience is very different, and I feel like I must know politer, less judgey people than she does. I don't have children, but it's not entirely volitional. There were infertility issues that made it difficult, and medical issues that led me to the decision not to pursue intervention in trying to conceive, and a lack of money and general contentedness with our life as it is that led my husband and I to decide not to pursue adoption. There were choices all the way along, and we made them.
They weren't easy, of course, but I'm at peace with all of them. That took quite a while, and many conversations, and a few years of it causing me some pain. But it's my own story, and honestly, I never feel like I've been judged for it. I don't think I've ever been talked down to by people because I chose not to have kids. People have asked, but generally once I've known them, and with delicacy and entire lack of judgement. So the whole "the world is full of pro-natalist pressure" just...doesn't ring true for me. I think that means I've been exceptionally lucky.
I've also never been bothered by other people having children around me. I love kids. I would have been a good mother, I think, but I'm also a pretty awesome me. And I'm happy being the cool aunt instead.
Which is to say that while I wanted kids, my self-worth was never ever tied up with being a mother in the way that the author of this book feels was foisted upon her by heteronormative family-obsessed family, friends, and culture. So...I don't respond to it. Sounds like I don't because I lucked the hell out.
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