Making Babies

Jan 9, 2025 11:31 AM

Author:Anne Enright

Making Babies

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny' Maggie O'Farrell

It's 2004 and Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy.

Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two. Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news - full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all.

An antidote to the high-minded, polemical 'How-to' baby manuals, Making Babies also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. Anne Enright wrote the truth of it as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

Reviews

1000 kilometres away from baby whisperer books, and one every petrified parent-to-be should read.

—— Sinead Gleeson , Image

Fizzingly entertaining. Reading it is like having a conversation with your funniest friend. Enright has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness

—— Sunday Times

Making Babies is an absolute joy, the perfect, intelligent antidote to poisonous books on the subject

—— India Knight

An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny

—— Maggie O'Farrell , Daily Telegraph

Gasp-making, jaw-dropping and eloquently astounding

—— Irish Indepedent

Enright is such an original and witty writer. Her tone is utterly unsentimental and kept reducing me to tears

—— Zoe Heller

Anne Enright is an eloquent writer...dazzlingly funny

—— Penelope Lively

Making Babies is not just a good book, it's a good thing. It induces hope. It creates an appetite for life. It is also a very effective contraceptive

—— Ian Sansom

A hopelessly vivid maker of sentence, of the sort you can't help reading aloud to whoever happens to be nearby... Ms. Enright's commentary on gender politics and babies, like a swimming pool illuminated by underwater lights, also casts an entrancingly strange glow

—— Dwight Garner , New York Times

Joyous!... very funny. With originality and truth, she perfectly nails the madness and simplicity of motherhood

—— i

a rich account...brilliant vignettes

—— Camilla Long , Sunday Times

This piercing memoir paints in vivid colours Julia Blackburn's nightmarish childhood

—— Alison Flood , The Telegraph

Blackburn tells us about these things in a compelling authorial voice which is by turns numb and incredibly sensitive

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

Brutally honest book ...deeply moving testament to the love that can somehow survive

—— Aimee Shalan , Guardian

An extraordinary family memoir... A bohemian classic

—— Week

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