REVIEW of "My Miserable, Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy" by Andrea Askowitz (Cleis Press 2008)

Andrea Askowitz, My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy (Cleis Press, 2008), 237 pp.

A sure testament to a writer’s talent is her ability to draw and hold a reader for whom the subject matter is congenitally unfamiliar.  Andrea Askowitz has lots of talent: her comic tale of the hormonal trainwreck that was her Left Coast pregnancy without a partner kept me – a homosexual, non-Jewish man from the East Coast with no intention of raising children -- in stitches from start to finish.  Never has schadenfreude been so sweet.

After breaking up with her girlfriend of five years, Askowitz decides to try pregnancy alone.  She goes to the sperm bank, sifts through donors, falls in love with her OB/GYN, becomes deeply depressed, disses her brother, obsesses over everything that could go wrong, self-diagnoses non-existent cancer, gets “fat,” learns what “doula” and a thousand other strange words mean, and ultimately gives birth to a child.  Some of the fun along the way is certainly born of her self-absorption and misery and malcontentedness, but Askowitz is looking for witness as much as laughs.  She imagines a party in which she invites her closest friends, insists they wear black and listen to her recite her top ten complaints about her life.  “Thank you for coming,” she writes.  “Do not have fun.”

Askowitz writes in a manner so immediate that the emotional surges, flashes of envy and of fury, and instant judgments as to people’s worth are visceral.  I didn’t like those people Askowitz didn’t like, and for those who complained about Askowitz’s uncensored mouth, I stood by her in saying, Get used to it!  I even winced when her nether parts ripped from stem to stern during birth.

A selection of some of Askowitz’s choice humor:

• Days before Askowitz gives birth, “Nurse Jones … shoves her finers into my vagina like she’s digging for a pickle at the bottom of the jar.  I say, ‘That hurts!’ and she looks at me like, Girl, this is nothing.  If you can’t handle this, you’re in big trouble [when the baby comes].
• Askowitz keels over on the sidewalk with pregnancy-induced dry heaves.  A neighbor passes.  Explaining why she did not stop, the neighbor says, “I thought you were praying.”
• When her would-be sperm donor proves to be shooting blanks, Askowitz bemoans her fate: “I was a lesbian with male fertility problems.”
• Askowitzs friend says, “think of your body not as the athlete’s body it used to be, but as a life creator.”  Askowitz’s reaction: “I take that to mean I’m fat.”