Pregnancy (reading) weekend
Hamptons irrelevance, desperation flaunts, shows at Cherry Lane, stracciatella on all the menus
I’m back in New York City. I had an altogether pleasant jet-lagged morning reading the zine Privacy, Molly Young’s pregnancy diary. Molly’s style is a remarkable combination of refinement and zippiness. Never boring! And you learn so much. (Available at McNally Jackson and online.) Now that I’m 35, I find myself reading about pregnancy voyeuristically. The fact that she almost dies heightens the dirty side of my interest. (Sorry.)
Much like he’s uninterested in divorce fiction, my husband is not interested in reading about pregnancy. He says it overexcites me to read about terrible things that happen to women, but really he’s just more interested in the lives of great and terrible men. (He’s reading about fascism, again. I hope they get to the bottom of it soon.) So I plow on alone. I suppose I’m doing pregnancy weekend, inadvertently kicked off by reading that bedrest article in the New Yorker, which neatly side quested me into buying Expecting Better by Emily Oster, the book that says, definitively, you can drink 3 cups of coffee per day while pregnant. It’s a soothing book because she’s a staunchly regimental and rational person, something I am not. Also, I drink a lot of coffee, and it would change my relationship to my job if I had to stop. I had to buy the book on audible, because it has a textbook quality (she wrote it while working as an economist at U Chicago alongside her economist husband), and also I’m only half-interested in what women should know while pregnant. Audible is one of my cheats when it comes to tangential non-fiction. Also I was on a plane: rapt audience, myself.
It was helpful to read both books in tandem, one day after another, and remember that women who have babies are not the women you see on TikTok (a bunch of idiots, from my perspective), but women like me (but smarter). I texted my husband random facts for him to remember: Sardines (Emily) and salmon (Molly) eaten during pregnancy can raise the IQ of the baby! Sushi is fine (Emily)! The germans have the best medical inventions for post-pregnancy (Molly; see below). Joe wrote back “Ok honey” to each one until I stopped texting him.
You’ll remember the last time I got interested in babies was the week of January 10th, where I made a (in hindsight WONDERFUL) post about the best luxury baby furniture and Alexis texted me, “Either you’re pregnant or not OK, which is it.” Hangs head in shame!!!
Links
One fascinating sentence in Molly’s book was about a child using a “Kosher phone” on the playground. You can buy a KosherCell here. “KosherCell has grown from humble beginnings into a large-scale provider of phones for all types of religious groups. Since inception, KosherCell has sold thousands of phones to thousands of people looking to stay in touch with others, without compromising on their values.”