Very Sad and Scary Places

Vicki Forman’s “memoir of premature motherhood” won top prize at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. Tom Bissel, who was on the selection committee for that prize, writes in his forward to the book, “It begins with a scene of almost unendurable horror. When the worst (one assumes) has passed, the reader awaits the various authorial balms, tonal coolants, and narrative stand-downs demanded by such a trauma-splashed opening. But the reader quickly staggers into another, even more intimate horror, and then another, and then another.”

The book is about Forman’s experiences after she gave birth to her twins, Evan and Ellie, after just twenty-three weeks of gestation. Ellie dies after four days. Evan goes on to have a long and complicated stay in the neonatal intensive care unit, followed by years of challenges as a child with severe disabilities. Eight years later, he, too, dies of an acute intestinal blockage.

Why should anyone read such a depressing catalogue of horrors?

Oddly, the book is not hard to read, although it is very hard to read dry-eyed. The author has a disarming integrity. There are few false notes of sentimentality, self-pity, or even righteous indignation. Forman takes us by the hand and walks with us through the very sad and scary places she has been, managing to show her own vulnerability at the same time that she shows incredible strength. She makes us want to walk beside her. The tears that the book evokes come honestly and feel cleansing. Bissel concludes, “This Lovely Life is not at all depressing. When I finished this book I felt, rather, an electric, wide-awake sadness, as though I had lost a close friend and made a new one on the same day.”

Excerpts do not capture this surprising upbeat quality. I recently used quotes from the book in a lecture to a group of Latin American neonatologists. The neonatologist who translated my slides wondered whether his English was inadequate. The title just seemed wrong, he said. The quotes could not be from a book called This Lovely Life. He wanted to translate the title as That’s Life.

Readers may wonder if the title is ironic. It is not. It comes from a poem that Forman read while visiting a friend, Holly, whose daughter, Alexandra, had been in the NICU with Evan. Alexandra was left with severe cerebral palsy. Holly had landscaped the backyard into a wheelchair-accessible playground with adapted equipment, “a backyard in which Alexandra and all the neighborhood kids could play together, where no one would feel left out” (p. 234). At the center of the yard was a hopscotch grid. In the center of the grid, on a tile, was a poem that Holly’s grandmother had written years before, called “Ah, Lovely Life.” After hearing the poem, Holly says, “I do want to live this life, despite everything, because it really is lovely.”

Still, excerpts give a hint of the book’s thought-provoking pleasures. At one point, Forman contrasts the terror that she felt as she went into premature labor with the twins with the “giddy euphoria” that she remembered at the term birth of her first child three years earlier. But then she notes, “Only years later would I understand how these births were more similar than I’d thought; that past the fear, the results were the same: a child to nurture and love” (p. 13).

Forman describes the events of her twins’ lives and deaths in journal form, with dated entries written in the present tense. She is also able to comment on those events from her authorial perspective, years later. This allows us, as readers, to experience the emotional impact and the suspense of the events in real time, but also to have the advantage of the author’s later interpretations and reflections. Because of this, the book is about the mother, even if the topic of the book is the babies.

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