Goodbye Without Leaving.2

Ah, Laurie Colwin, you are my best friend through big life changes, motherhood not excepting.

Geraldine's slightly detached, sarcastic approach to finding her vocation and to pregnancy and motherhood are just what the doctor ordered. It isn't exactly my approach (I'm sadly probably more like Geraldine's intensely anxious husband), but that's all the more reason that I find it delightful.

My favorite parts of the book:

"One afternoon I felt myself the victim of a woodpecker drilling for bugs in my pelvic bones. I reached for one of Johnny's birth books, which I consulted to see what my developing fetus looked like. It now looked like an actual baby, only small. A drilling sensation, it said, is usually the fetus having hiccoughs." (Colwin is exactly right: baby hiccups feel like a woodpecker drilling for bugs in my pelvic bones.)

When she kisses a European, as part of her attraction to Judaism and Catholicism and order: "I was sort of a blank slate and Leo was a school. I needed the experience of him. He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt. I would definitely be a better person for it." (That may be precisely why I love Laurie Colwin: "He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt" may be the best line ever.)

Goodbye Without Leaving previously here.