In The Paris Review’s Revisited column, Sarah Menkedick writes about reading Louise Erdrich’s “The Blue Jay’s Dance” while pregnant.
This paragraph put into words something I’ve been trying to articulate for two years:
I had understood motherhood up until then as either the stultifying oppression of conventionality or an exercise of triumphing-in-spite-of, staying cutting edge and ambitious and successful by proudly suppressing or minimizing the maternal. Erdrich offered me another model: motherhood as profound creative subject, as way of seeing, even as empowerment. She gave me permission to be a woman
