More Babies Prefer Home Birth

“Home/Birth” is structured as a fragmented succession of thoughts, recollections, slogans, facts, poetry, stream-of-consciousness riffing on pregnancy, on birth and sometimes on the state of the world. On any given page, the pieces appear only loosely connected, but throughout the book a number of themes recur at intervals, creating a number of interwoven plot lines around the larger theme of childbirth. Much of the text involves a conversation between Greenberg and Zucker, exerpted from their actual conversations, conducted by e-mail. Zucker, who had three children of her own, the first two born in hospitals and the most recent a homebirth, was in New York at the time, but committed to becoming a doula (someone who helps the mother during labor) for Greenberg’s birth, and in the initial chapters of the book, the friends appear to be trying to figure out how it will all work. The style and point of view are both unusual among homebirth literature, Greenberg said. The lyric essay style was inspired by the author C.D. Wright, who used a similar montage of observations, snippets of dialog and other ephemera to write about prisoners in Louisiana in her book “One Big Self.”