My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy | 
| Author: Andrea Askowitz
Publisher: Cleis Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 238041
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 241
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 1573443158
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.8743092
EAN: 9781573443159
Publication Date: April 28, 2008
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Product Description
In this memoir of her 40 weeks and five days in hell, Andrea Askowitz takes an unflinching look at her pregnant life from struggling with hormones to poor body image to a self imposed exile from family to take us on a ride through the turbulence of single lesbian motherhood. Along the way we meet her liberal parents as they struggle with their daughter's choices, the lover she longs to reconnect with who goes M.I.A. before the pregnancy, the friends who turn out to be no help at all and strangers who offer up some unlikely kindness. Andrea presents herself real, raw, impossibly cranky yet deeply touching with her self-deprecating dark sense of humor that will make you wince or better yet send you into uncontrollable fits of laughter
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 painfully funny! October 6, 2008
I really enjoyed this book, it had me laughing and crying at the same time!
 Misery Can Be Fun! October 2, 2008
A sure testament to a writer's talent is her ability to draw and hold a reader for whom the subject matter is congenitally unfamiliar. Andrea Askowitz has lots of talent: her comic tale of the hormonal trainwreck that was her Left Coast pregnancy without a partner kept me - a homosexual, non-Jewish man from the East Coast with no intention of raising children -- in stitches from start to finish. Never has schadenfreude been so sweet.
After breaking up with her girlfriend of five years, Askowitz decides to try pregnancy alone. She goes to the sperm bank, sifts through donors, falls in love with her OB/GYN, becomes deeply depressed, disses her brother, obsesses over everything that could go wrong, self-diagnoses non-existent cancer, gets "fat," learns what "doula" and a thousand other strange words mean, and ultimately gives birth to a child. Some of the fun along the way is certainly born of her self-absorption and misery and malcontentedness, but Askowitz is looking for witness as much as laughs. She imagines a party in which she invites her closest friends, insists they wear black and listen to her recite her top ten complaints about her life. "Thank you for coming," she writes. "Do not have fun."
Askowitz writes in a manner so immediate that the emotional surges, flashes of envy and of fury, and instant judgments as to people's worth are visceral. I didn't like those people Askowitz didn't like, and for those who complained about Askowitz's uncensored mouth, I stood by her in saying, Get used to it! I even winced when her nether parts ripped from stem to stern during birth.
A selection of some of Askowitz's choice humor:
*Days before Askowitz gives birth, "Nurse Jones ... shoves her finers into my vagina like she's digging for a pickle at the bottom of the jar. I say, `That hurts!' and she looks at me like, Girl, this is nothing. If you can't handle this, you're in big trouble [when the baby comes].
*Askowitz keels over on the sidewalk with pregnancy-induced dry heaves. A neighbor passes. Explaining why she did not stop, the neighbor says, "I thought you were praying."
*When her would-be sperm donor proves to be shooting blanks, Askowitz bemoans her fate: "I was a lesbian with male fertility problems."
*Askowitzs friend says, "think of your body not as the athlete's body it used to be, but as a life creator." Askowitz's reaction: "I take that to mean I'm fat."
The sheer crankiness of at least eight of her nine months pregnancy proves a perfect foil to the almost speechless (well, not quite, this is Askowitz after all: she does get in a few gripes about the grape-sized hemorrhoids that result from her child's birth) awe with which Askowitz regards the miracle of her newborn child. "I have a crush like no other I've ever experienced. It's one-sided, pure and egoless. ... " Hell, after reading this memoir, I was ready to go get knocked up myself.
 Pregnancy is Not for the Weak of Heart or Stomach! July 7, 2008
My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy is author, Andrea Askowitz's brutally honest memoir recounting the months she spent trying to get pregnant, actually pregnant, and as a new mother. As can be easily discerned from the title, Andrea did not enjoy being pregnant and she makes no effort to sugarcoat her experience. Askowitz is frank and extremely open in describing the messy and oftentimes unpleasant experiences involved with pregnancy and child birth.
What makes My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy work as a memoir is the balance that Askowitz manages to maintain between candid description of her opinions and admission that those opinions might have been skewed by her own gloom. Askowitz pulls no punches in describing her bitter disappoint with her friends, her ex-girlfriend, and her family; however, her harsh judgments are tempered by her acknowledgment that her estimations were not always fair and that she was a big pain in the neck. Askowitz's ability to call herself out on her own issues makes her endearing and likeable.
Askowitz's ability to be so unguarded in her writing oftentimes results in uproarious hilarity. Her recounting of her arguments and passive-aggressive altercations with her therapist will leave readers in stitches. She is candid, annoying, funny, loving, infuriating, and a whole host of other contradicting descriptions that make a person complicated and interesting.
Overall, this is a thoroughly enjoyable memoir that lifts the curtain on the rosy, glowing pregnancy facade that is usually presented to reveal the difficult, hard, and ugly side of pregnancy.
I do, however, feel a responsibility to future readers to mention that this might not be the book for those who consider themselves exceptionally squeamish, prudish, or easily offended.
Loved It June 30, 2008
I laughed, I cried, I laughed some more . . . Andrea's story was funny and very real -- everyone can identify with some aspect of this lonely, lesbian, pregnant (and very funny) woman.
not as bad as I thought June 19, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Okay, so as a gay man I wasn't really interested in reading this book but a friend of mine insisted her and her friends thought it was hilarious and biting, which they seem to think is right up my alley (I wonder). Thus I gave the book a shot and really it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, in fact it does have it's moments of biting sarcastic humor, not quite as literistic as say Sedaris but still, better than most. Ms. Askowitz does lay it all out there and sometimes comes off as a whiner and you really just want to tell her to get over it and be happy or at least move on from the ex-girlfriend Kate, who really, it seems, is just dragging her down. But I'm guessing one can chalk her continual moodiness up to the over stimulation of hormones pregnant women go through, or at least I hope that is the case. It seems so as towards the end of the book she comes to some kind of acceptance for being a single mom and loving the little one she has given birth to, she almost seems relaxed for her new role. I'm not going to say every gay man should read this, because let's face it most could care less, but for those other few of us and for single women looking to have a child, it's worth a read.
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