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A Mother's Story for Our Times
Knopf
April 2006
272 pages
ISBN: 1400043832
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In the winter of 2002, Jenny Minton delivered twin boys.
She was thirty-one weeks pregnant, and her boys, conceived
through in vitro fertilization, were more than two months
early. Both boys were placed on immediate life support, and
for sixty-four days they hovered, critically ill, in the
neonatal intensive care unit of a New York City hospital.
The Early Birds is a record of their time there and
the story of Minton's harrowing, triumphant quest to bring
her sons home.
With impeccable restraint, in sharp,
unforgettable scenes, Minton takes readers into the heart of
an experience that is both singular and--with a significant
increase in twin births over the last twenty years, and a
commensurate rise in premature births--increasingly common.
She reflects with piercing candor on her persistent, often
heartbreaking reckoning with her own guilt, and the
inadequacy she feels for not having carried her boys to
term. She examines how little she knew, and how little
information doctors provided, as she entered the largely
unregulated realm of assisted reproduction. She confronts
her decision not to go back to work, and the overwhelming
sensation that life has swept her away. She offers moving
interrogations of science and fate, and the role of
providence in conception. And she describes the glorious
triumphs of ordinary life, even as she wrestles with the
unanswerable questions that remain.
A fiercely
intelligent, closely observed, powerfully gripping narrative
about conception and childbirth, and a poignant and
provocative journey into motherhood in an age of modern
medicine, told with precision and indelible grace.
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