Interview with Joanna Wolfarth, author of Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding
Joanna Wolfarth, author of Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding recommends some fantastic books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Joanna's book:
Review from Book Depository:
When Joanna Wolfarth was pregnant with her first child, she assumed she would breastfeed, as her mother had fed her. Yet she was unprepared for the startling realities of new motherhood. Then, just four weeks after the birth, she found herself back in hospital with an underweight baby, bewildered by inconsistent advice and overcome with feelings of guilt and isolation.
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Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding
Months later, her cultural historian's impulse led her to look to the past for guidance. What she discovered, neglected in the archives, amazed and reassured her. By piecing together cultural debris - from fragments of ancient baby bottles to eighteenth-century breast pumps, from the Palaeolithic Woman of Willendorf figurine to the poignantly inventive work of Louise Bourgeois and from mythical accounts of the creation of the Milky Way to advice found in Victorian medical manuals - Joanna began to understand how feeding our babies can be culturally, economically and physiologically determined as well as deeply personal and emotive.
Using the arc of her own experience, Joanna takes us on an intimate journey of discovery beyond mother and baby, asking how the world views caregivers, their bodies, their labour and their communal bonds. By bringing together art, social histories, philosophy, folk wisdom and contemporary interviews with women from across the world, Milk reveals how infant feeding has been represented and repressed, celebrated and censured. In doing so, Joanna charts previously unexplored territory and offers comfort and solace to anyone who has fed or will feed a child.
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Easons €23.80
Book Depository €15.90
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Wordery $17.49
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Am I allowed two? The first is John Berger's Ways of Seeing, which was one of the first texts I read as an undergraduate and which changed my perception of the world and what art history could be. The second is The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. A stunning book which interrogates identity, love, desire, care, parenthood.
Review From Book Depository
'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
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An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family
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Ways of Seeing
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
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The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
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Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
My most recent read isn't actually out until later this year, but I recommend getting hands of a copy of Womb by midwife Leah Hazard when it does come out. It takes us on a much-needed journey of discovery on a topic which has been sadly neglected for too long.
Review From Book Depository:
The womb is the most miraculous organ in the body - with the power to bring life or cause death; to yield joy or pain - yet most of us know almost nothing about it.
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Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began
In this book, midwife and bestselling author Leah Hazard sets out on a journey to explore the rich past, complex present and dynamic future of the uterus. She speaks to the Californian doctor who believes women deserve a period-free life; walks in the footsteps of the Scottish woman whose Caesarean section changed childbirth forever; uncovers America's long history of forced and coercive sterilisation; observes uterine transplant surgery in Sweden and takes a very personal dive into the world of 'womb wellness'.
Written with wisdom, warmth and nuance, and combining the author's years of experience as a midwife with medical history, scientific discovery and journalistic inquiry, Womb is an extraordinary exploration of a woefully under-researched and misunderstood organ. Above all, the book reveals that the uterus is more than the sum of its biological parts: it influences all our lives in the twenty-first century, and how we celebrate, medicate and legislate the womb might yet control where we go from here.
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Easons €21.00
Book Depository €19.31
Waterstones £18.31
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Watership Down - I have very clear memories of my parents reading me a chapter a night at bedtime. And I'm looking forward to doing the same with my own children in a couple of years.
Review From Book Depository
Sandleford Warren is in danger. Hazel's younger brother Fiver is convinced that a great evil is about to befall the land, but no one will listen. And why would they when it is Spring and the grass is fat and succulent? So together Hazel and Fiver and a few other brave rabbits secretly leave behind the safety and strictures of the warren and hop tentatively out into a vast and strange world.
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Watership Down
Chased by their former friends, hunted by dogs and foxes, avoiding farms and other human threats, but making new friends, Hazel and his fellow rabbits dream of a new life in the emerald embrace of Watership Down . . .
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Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I prefer paper, and I will make pencil notes in the margins or fold down corners which I know can be controversial! I do use a Kindle though and it was great during night feeds with a small baby, and of course for travel.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I'll spend days in most second hand bookshops. A recent discovery is the vast Eagle Books in Bedford.
Many thanks to Joanna for recommending some fantastic books! Please don't forget to check out Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Orion Publishing Co (Milk), Melville House UK (The Argonauts), Little, Brown Book Group (Womb), Penguin Books Ltd (Ways of Seeing, Watership Down).
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