Review: You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman

You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: The Diary of a New Mother by Judith Newman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A $1 Housingworks Sale find. An easy read that I devoured quickly.

This book chronicles the struggles of a woman trying to get pregnant in her 40s. She has twins and the book continues until they're ~20 months old. She lives in Manhattan, apparently in our neighborhood.

My favorite passage is about her trying to get a key to the NYU residential playground, the one we could have access to if we had kids because we're NYU residents. She describes the real estate manager exactly as I imagine her to be when Shawn describes the woman he deals with (Shawn's pretty sure it's not the same woman):

"[The Key Park:] is controlled by a bureaucrat in one of NYU's real estate management offices who gives out keys by whim, a woman I know nothing about. But as my frustration has grown I have become fond of ascribing her new identities and new levels of insanity. Most recently I decided she was someone who owns many, many parakeets."

From earlier in the book, a thought on marriage that cracked me up: "Men look at marriages as a contract: you change, you break the contract. Women look at marriage as a screen play. You change? Call in a rewrite!"

I can't say I'd recommend going to any effort to find and read this book (unless you are struggling with infertility - I think success stories of similar problems would probably be welcome then ... and this is well written and funny and touching), but if you happen across it, definitely work a buck.

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