San Francisco Chronicle’s Best 100 Fiction/Nonfiction

This Lovely Life appears on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best 100 Fiction/Nonfiction List for 2009.  What an honor, since this list also contains some of my own favorite books of 2009, including Victoria Patterson’s Drift, as well as memoirs by Tracy Kidder and Mary Karr.  Fabulous company, some of the very best a writer could imagine.

“Knowing What You Know Now?”

These were the words I was asked earlier in the week, at a reading at the UC Irvine Bookstore.  “Knowing what you know now, would you still demand that your twins not be resuscitated?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

In the long pause that followed, I understood how inadequate the reply.  Knowing what I know now includes so much:  how extreme prematurity affects a family, what a strain it can put on relationships, that marriages fail and parents go broke.  The never-ending care and involvement of doctors, therapists, and social services.  Standing before the bookstore crowd, how could I begin to address that history and those complications?

“I still believe, fundamentally, that if a baby is going to be resuscitated at this gestational age, it is the parents who ought to be making that decision.  The parents will be the ones caring for this child, not the doctors, and it is the parents whose lives will be affected.  Knowing what I know now, that is still my position.”

“But would you still ask for the same?”

I thought of my life these past ten years, my son and all I have learned.  The bookstore was not the place to tell all this, and thirty seconds at a podium hardly afforded me the chance to speak of those lessons, the nuances:  what it was like to hear my son’s laugh in the morning and how I never thought of his birth and my demands in those moments.  Protecting him from the judgment of others because of his disabilities, and that the doctors or the delivery were gone to me, so far gone, because they were not at all relevant to what I did every day.  The question was far too simple for such a complex set of meditations.  How could I address fear, and grief, and compassion and love?  Impossible.

So instead I said, “It’s complicated.  There’s no easy answer.  A person can’t put herself into a past moment in time and not be a different person, based on all she has learned.  The decision wouldn’t be the same, because the events wouldn’t be the same.”

Knowing what I know now, the answer remains, “I don’t know.”

On ethics

Last week, I had the great pleasure of meeting and being on a panel with John Lantos, world-renowned neonatologist and bioethicist, at the conference for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.  Dr. Lantos had invited me and fellow panelists, Annie Janvier and Barbara Sourkes, to discuss the topic, “Translating Pain Into Poetry.”  Annie and I read from our work, while Barbara shared with the audience her insights gained from a lifetime’s experience in providing palliative care to children.  The subsequent Q&A  centered on how to incorporate the pressing ethical concerns raised into every day discourse.  As a good friend said to me afterwards, there wouldn’t be any discussion of ethics if there weren’t a problem in the first place.

A day after our panel,  Lantos addressed the society at large in the Inaugural March of Dimes Distinguished Lecture.  In his lecture, Lantos spoke on the topic, “Doctors Are All Alike, Parents Are All Different.”  While it would be impossible to summarize Lantos’ words, but the power of his ideas lay in his overall theory that while doctors need and demand statistics to help understand and make their cases for interventions (or lack of interventions) with extremely premature infants, parents, in fact, have a nearly unpredictable set of responses to being in the situation of having given birth to those same infants.  Lantos so effectively problematized the matter, we can only hope that he publishes his remarks eventually so that others can benefit.

Despite the rainy weekend, there was much to learn, and even more to be gained.  Thank you, John, Annie and Barbara.

Review in the Yale Alumni Magazine

Many years ago, when still a high school senior, I visited New Haven with my mom to have an interview and tour the campus of Yale University.  After the interview, my mom and I called my dad to tell him it had gone well and that I loved the school.  Over the phone, my dad started singing, “Boola boola.”

These are the kinds of events we have as children that make us remember our parents:  the times we made them proud.  I was admitted to Yale that fall and managed to make it out intact, with my B.A. in Literature.  I don’t write much about my college experience in This Lovely Life, but it is absolutely the case that experience of being an intellectual, among the brightest of my generation, informed the way I wrote about being a mother to a disabled child, many years later.

This month, the Yale Alumni Magazine ran a lovely review of my book, one that brings my time at Yale, and the experience I describe in This Lovely Life wonderfully, beautifully full circle.  And, yes, it made my dad proud, all over again.

Considering a book club?

I’ve now been part of several book clubs discussing This Lovely Life, all of which have been richly rewarding talks about faith, medicine, spirituality, and motherhood.  If you’re considering adopting the book for a book club, I’m available in person if the situation is local to Southern California, or by Skype if you’re further afield.  I can pop in at the beginning of the discussion to read a bit from the book and introduce the story, or at the end of the talk to answer questions and continue the conversation.  To learn more, just send an email and I’d be happy to respond.

And now

Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the creme de la creme of conferences for writers.  I’ll be here for ten days, meeting, reading, and just plain talking books.  The view from my window, in idyllic Vermont:

See you all on the flip side!

More press

Over the weekend, a front page interview by Katharine Mieszkowski on Salon garnered quite a bit of response and attention.  Reader letters commented on the controversy of resuscitating our twins against our wishes, with voices expressing both outrage at the doctors, and our determination.  The piece was the most read story for several days, and has been picked up by various other news and media outlets, including Emily Bazelon at Double X.

That same weekend brought a review in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.  In the review, Susanna Sonnenberg writes,

I might say that “This Lovely Life” is an indictment of our health care system (Forman has an excellent ear for doctors’ hostility and inadvertent cruelty), or a passionate treatise on mother love, and certainly you could read the book for confirmation of both, but I don’t think the author cares to make those judgments. She is neither apologetic nor unapologetic: She writes more for a fierce private truth than for any published effect. It is our good fortune to witness a beautiful heart beating out its own epic.

I’ll be in San Francisco next week, reading at Book Passage Corte Madera Thursday, August 6th at 7 pm, and appearing on ABC-TV’s View From the Bay at three that same afternoon.  If you’re in the area, please do stop by.