HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO AUTHOR JENNIFER WEINER!
In honor of Jennifer Weiner’s birthday, I’m sharing an excerpt from her work about a mother’s first glimpse her new baby. I was torn when it came to choosing a passage to celebrate. If you read my blog on a regular basis or have read any of my fiction, you probably guessed how much I love food. And Jennifer Weiner has some delicious dish descriptions in her narrative. But, once again, I decided it more fitting to choose something that captures a new life and one author’s expression of a paradoxically universal and unique experience of the day a baby is born.
They eased me into a wheelchair, sore and stitched up, hurting all over, and wheeled me to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I couldn’t go in, they explained, but I could see her through the window. A nurse pointed her out. “There,” she said, gesturing.
I leaned so close my forehead pressed on the glass. She was so small. A wrinkled pink grapefruit. Limbs no bigger than my pinky, hands the size of my thumbnail, a head the size of a smallish nectarine. Tiny eyes squinched shut, a look of outrage on her face. A dusting of black fuzz on top of her head, a nondescript beige-ish hat on top of that. “She weighs almost three pounds,” the nurse who was pushing me said.
Baby, I whispered, and tapped my fingers against the windows, drumming a soft rhythm. She hadn’t been moving, but when I tapped she pinwheeled her arms. Waving at me, I imagined. Hi, baby, I said. Excerpt, Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner.
If you like Jennifer Weiner’s books, recommend your favorite to me! I’m listening!
Take care,
Lisa Lipkind Leibow
Author of Smart Women’s Fiction
www.LLLeibow.com
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