“I HAD NO IDEA how fucked up this was going to be,” says a woman with a newborn in Elisa Albert’s new novel, After Birth. “Tell me about it,” replies Ari, the protagonist. Ari and her new acquaintance, aging ex-riot grrrl Mina Morris, are new mothers with some strong opinions on baby formula and swaddling, but if you’re looking for mommy-blog smugness, you won’t find it here.
After Birth is a brutal, occasionally graphic, sharp-edged look into Ari’s life in the year after her son was delivered via Caesarean section. At just under 200 pages, it’s a slight, starkly constructed habitat. In a haze of postpartum depression, Ari slowly recovers from an invasive surgery she didn’t choose, while simultaneously railing against and welcoming the feeling that her identity has been subsumed by motherhood. Meanwhile, she’s profoundly lonely, living with her academic husband in a rundown college town in upstate New York, and desperate for the promise of female companionship she sees in Mina. Ari’s also haunted by two ghosts—that of the women’s studies dissertation she’s no longer actually working on, and her long-dead mother, whose edges were even sharper than her own.
There are two myths about this book I’d like to dispel right away. The first comes from author Shalom Auslander, who’s called Albert “[Charles] Bukowski with a vagina and a motherfucker of a hangover,” in what can be (charitably) read as an attempt at high praise. If you’re looking for a lady Bukowski, though, you have no business reading this book. Because After Birth‘s frank talk of “surgically evacuating” small humans, the “commonplace violence” of undergoing an involuntary C-section, and its strong undercurrent of undeniably female rage—what Ari describes as “the fucking, the sadness, the dark, the blood, the light”—would almost certainly have left Bukowski squicked out and quaking behind his hangover-sunglasses.