- Picador
- SPOILER ALERT: No one in this book has kids.
Meghan Daum’s a sharp-edged contarian who writes gloriously spare prose, so I’ll read anything she touches. After I devoured The Unspeakable, I had no choice but to read her newly released anthology, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, which is about people who don’t like children—JK, it’s about people who do, but don’t want their own! I was excited to read this book, but as I did, I realized I maybe wasn’t the target audience for it, because, you see, I don’t think childless adults are selfish, shallow, or self-absorbed! And while quiverfull sympathizers and humorless politicians who consider all women mothers until proven otherwise certainly exist, um, I’m not that guy? This led me to wonder who the book’s target audience was, as I, the choir, took in some (mostly) agreeable, yet rather uneven preaching.
Here’s the thing about anthologies: They are almost always hit or miss, and not even someone as wonderful as Meghan Daum can save them. There are some standout essays in Daum’s collection, for sure—contributions from Paul Lisicky, Geoff Dyer, and Elliott Holt are a few that I’d be glad to read anywhere—but too many prove a point I’m pretty sure Daum wasn’t setting out to make: that childfree people can be just as sanctimonious about their life choices as parents. Alas! Some of the writers assume a preachy (in a bad way) “choose your choice” feminism that falsely equates progressive social values with what’s basically good luck afforded by privilege. Don’t get me wrong: being electively childless, like choosing to be a parent, should be a right available to everyone. But in our current political climate—particularly for women who live below the federal poverty line or in abortion-hostile states—it’s not.
These women do not appear in Daum’s anthology.
In “The Trouble with Having it All,” Pam Houston discusses Roe v. Wade and her own “freedom of choice,” but never acknowledges that for many American women, not having access to abortion and birth control means not having such choices at all. And in “You’d Be Such a Good Mother, if Only You Weren’t You,” M.G. Lord, in the process of adopting a baby with her partner, senses danger when she finds out one potential birth mother has given birth four times since age 14—which seems less indicative of, say, drug use, than poverty. In fact, according to the Brookings Institute, unintended birth rates are nearly five times higher for women with incomes below the federal poverty line than for those with incomes four times the poverty level or higher. To be fair, this is a collection by writers, not public health experts, and I’m certainly not arguing that anyone be grateful they don’t have it worse, but I DO think that when you’re positioning your own decisions as reflective of your values on a macro-level—which many of these essays do—then you have a responsibility to look beyond yourself.
Fortunately, there’s a lot to like about the collection as a whole. Elliott Holt’s essay, “Just an Aunt,” is a powerful meditation on managing mental illness and ultimately choosing her nieces instead of children of her own, in part because, with her history of anxiety and depression, she’d be at risk for postpartum depression. “Suicide is the leading cause of death for new mothers,” writes Holt. “I’d rather not take that chance.” Geoff Dyer reaches new heights of misanthropy in “Over and Out,” writing of the private school on his London street, “As I was walking past one day—i.e., skulking by like a fucking nonce—I saw an almost unbelievable sight: members of staff holding open the doors of cars for these kids so that at the age of seven they could start developing the sense of being visiting dignitaries.” And Paul Lisicky’s “The New Rhoda” braids together his experiences watching friends die of AIDS as a gay man in the 90s (“in crucial ways, I’ll always be someone wired by growing up during that siege”), and the awareness, with the dissolution of a long-term relationship, that future fatherhood is unlikely. If, like me, you’re here mostly for Meghan Daum, and don’t really have a dog in this fight, read these essays first; then get back to freaking out about The Unspeakable.