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When I read the first few pages of Elaine
D. Fox's No One Should Get Pregnant Alone (Austin, TX:
TurnKey Press, 2006), I was put off by what I read as dismissal
of women's issues in humorously-intended interjections. However,
by the time I reached the eighth of forty chapters, I decided
I liked this woman narrator. I had selected the book to read
from its title, hoping it was about a pregnant woman who was
truly without a male partner. Although Fox's central woman character,
Emily Vance, is married and financially situated well enough
that she can decide to stay home with her child even though her
husband is somewhat reluctant, she reaches for an audience of
women who have not been able to conceive with their partner.
Her semi-autobiographical novel educates readers about the expensive
and difficult process of artificial insemination in a more comprehensive
manner than any clinics brochure would ever be able to achieve.
Fox details the process, including the emotions of Vance, her
husbands reaction, and the physical process involved. Although
some readers may wish for more awareness of contemporary social
gender issues, Fox is best when she says it straight, concentrating
on the emotions and unadorned reactions, without trying to mitigate
or contextualize. Readers can reflect on the gender issues for
themselves.
Fox also reaches an audience of mothers of young children through
tackling other common problems that face women. She writes about
being ignored socially as a stay-at-home mother and the desire
for some relief from motherhood's demands. She tells us equally
frankly about the young husbands resistance to what he sees as
his wife's obsession with getting pregnant and with motherhood.
Emily Vance is quick to express her feelings to her family, ready
to confront her husband or sister with her needs, and equally
willing to work through the problems caused by her impatient
insistence on speaking and acting out these needs. She doesn't
rationalize the sometimes self-absorbed emotions she sets loose
on those closest to her, and this is why I like her. Although
the story ends with Vance ready to share the result of her positive
pregnancy test with her husband, Fox does not leave the impression
that everything will, of course, work out. She has not sugarcoated
the difficulties of the young marriage, and readers do not feel
certain that the couple will in fact get through the raising
of two children with their love intact. We assume that Vance's
father, absent from her book after a chapter describing a period
of convalescence following surgery, may not have lived; and we
know that Vance's husband has difficulty accepting her mothers
desire to help the young couple financially. Vance's relationship
with her sister withstands but barely the assault of Vance's
readiness to strike out; and Vance's best friend has outlasted
her husbands affair but never summoned the courage to confront
him. In short, Fox has managed to enough of the difficulties
of the lives of her characters that she manages to be real. She
should keep her willingness to let her woman characters and their
circumstances be less than perfect, to voice what real women
and men feel, and to let them act as real people do.
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Elaine Fox lives in Gurnee, Illinois, with her husband and three
children. After graduating from the University of Illinois, Fox
worked in the corporate world but left it to become a mother.
No One Should Get Pregnant Alone is her first novel; it
draws autobiographically from her own difficulties in conceiving
her first child and her deep desire to be a mother.
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