Reviews for This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood

The average rating for This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-03 00:00:00 Charles Brandon In reading other glowing reviews of this book, I think that I must have missed something in my reading. The book is an interesting page-turner, and the experiences the author and her family had to go through with their premature children are unquestionably difficult beyond understanding and deserving of much sympathy. However, I felt that the tone of the book was quite bitter (there is a lot of finger pointing at various doctors and health professionals) and, until the last few pages, did not coincide with the title "this lovely life." But I do admire the author's sometimes brutal honesty. She is not afraid to portray her own fallibility alongside others'. I guess that my main problem with the book was that the author's love for her disabled son did not emanate from the pages (although I'm sure that it was there). Instead, I felt that her sense of duty did. For some reason, this bothered me a bit.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-21 00:00:00 John Magar wow. this staggered me. it's the memoir of a woman who gave birth to catastrophically premature twins, a boy & a girl. when she learned that she was in preterm labor, she recognized that her babies were likely to be very, very sick, if they survived at all, & she begged the doctors to let them go rather than performing heroic feats of resuscitation. but her doctors refused, & refused again when she asked for a DNR order in the NICU. it was kind of shocking to read about how these doctors disregarded her wishes, knowing that they were saving these babies for what would most likely be foreshortened lives full of medical traumas. it's not really a spoiler to report that the girl twin died after four days. the boy twin survived, but was in the NICU & the pediatric intensive care unit for a year & a half. really puts my 24 days in the NICU with my daughter into perspective. she only cooked for six weeks longer than these babies...what a difference that makes when we are talking about fetal development. i don't really want to go into too much detail about the book, so i will just say that it was amazing & sad & so many things. maybe my emotional reaction to it was due to being so recently post-partum & having had my own NICU experience...this probably isn't a great book to read if you are pregnant or if your micro-preemie is currently in the NICU, because it's terrifying in a lot of ways. but i'm glad i read it, & i regret that this review is failing so woefully at expressing my feelings.