An excerpt from
Paradise, Piece by Piece —
“How do you grow up if you don’t have children? How do you remake the original love—mother love—into a mature love? Becoming a parent provokes this conversion, but the transformation into adulthood without the bearing of children means metamorphosis. The change is not instant and permanent like parenthood. It is a surfacing into adulthood and a diving down into childhood, and a poking into sharp air again, then a plunge into watery warmth, gradually converting your gills to lungs. After a time, you breathe in air exclusively, just as all adults do.”
Continued excerpt from
Paradise, Piece by Piece —
“If I could have told that girl, who waited to hear her father’s car crawl up the driveway, that things would never be as bad as they were at that moment, I think she would not have believed me. I imagine whispering into her ear, a skinny little shrimp with lank hair wearing a soiled blouse, her face at once both horrified and grim, that her life will be an adventure and that she will become a poet and live in two countries with a boy she would meet very soon. I see her turn her head a little bit on her neck, straightening her slump just a bit, and watch a slow, noncommittal sort of astonishment begin in her spine, delight moving up her vertebrae till it hits the top of her head and moves her shoulders back. I tell her¾she is fourteen years old—that if she holds on for thirty years she’s going to love her life. This girl does not say, “Thirty years! How will I hold on?” She does not complain or hope; instead, she walks. She walks across the empty plain, requiring that emptiness completely. Paradoxically, for her it will become full of creativity.”
What People Are Saying
“A courageous and elegantly written memoir that explores the distinction between motherhood and womanhood and celebratesthe path of the artist—as a self-defined, complete woman. Molly Peacock's warmth, humor, and candor with strike a chord with a generation coming to terms with the decision to have, or not to have, children."
— Gail Sheehy
"What will stay with most readers, I think, is the vivid picture she paints of the loneliness women often feel in dealing with the social pressures concerning motherhood.”
— Margot Livesey,
The New York Times Book Review
"Art and life in service to each other produce the portrait of a woman who, in the vital construction of herself, unpossessively embraces the reader as if the reader were her own liberated child."