This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood by Vicki Forman, Tom Bissell (Foreword by)

From the Publisher

Vicki Forman gave birth to Evan and Ellie, weighing just a pound at birth, at twenty-three weeks’ gestation. During the delivery she begged the doctors to "let her babies go" — she knew all too well that at twenty-three weeks they could very well die and, if they survived, they would face a high risk of permanent disabilities. However, California law demanded resuscitation. Her daughter died just four days later; her son survived and was indeed multiply disabled: blind, nonverbal, and dependent on a feeding tube.

Publishers Weekly

Forman's enormously affecting memoir-winner of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize-about the drastic disabilities of her extremely premature child poses challenging questions about parenthood and human compassion. Having given birth to twins at just six months' gestation (23 weeks), due to an undetected infection she learned of only much later, the author, living with her husband and three-year-old daughter in Southern California, and aware of the daunting health issues facing these babies, begged the doctors to "let them go." However, the doctors refused the "do-not-resuscitate" order, offering the infants every form of neonatal intensive care available, and while one of the twins died within days, the boy, Evan, survived, spending six months in the hospital before the family could take him home. Evan was plagued by severe developmental difficulties, including seizures, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, congenital heart defect and blindness, and the author writes with unflinching honesty about her raw fear and conflicted feelings. With time, Forman persevered as Evan's advocate, finding solace in friendships with other mothers of special-needs children and open to experimental therapies that might prove helpful. Numbed by the crass exigencies surrounding the burial of one child (cemetery plots, tax forms), and hardened by what she terms post-traumatic stress syndrome, Forman portrays herself (sometimes shockingly) as deeply flawed and forgivingly human. (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

The harrowing experience of a woman whose twins were born at 23 weeks. Forman explores the many issues of premature birth without presuming to offer solutions or comfort, drawing directly from the raw outrage, torment and profound sorrow she recorded in her journal. She makes it her life purpose to stay apace with the minutiae of her children's fragile, ever-changing conditions, doggedly expanding her knowledge of medical terminology and navigating every diagnostic twist and turn with research, skepticism and occasional self-doubt. Beneath her outward mettle is a mother who is continually probing every phase of the grief process. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance do not progress in conventional order but churn and shift within her consciousness on a minute-by-minute basis, depending on the latest lab report, nurse's comment or conference with doctors. Forman's lack of pretense is bracing and brutally poignant, and she recounts her experiences in meticulous emotive and medical detail. Whether praising or condemning hospital staff, wrestling with the marital pressures engendered by family health crises, struggling to find spiritual solace, driving her son 1,000 miles to an alternative-treatment center or watching him happily roll around on the motel bed, Forman is a warrior. Threaded through her untethered courage and candor are moments of sheer helplessness: "They say it's your baby, but until you go home it's not your baby."A searing tale of heartache and impressive depth of character.

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