LOVED AND WANTED
A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood
By Christa Parravani
This story begins, as many untold stories do, with a pregnancy test. A woman alone in a bathroom. Two lines. One for each choice, ostensibly: keep it, or don’t. This woman flings the test at the tiled wall. Tellingly, it bounces right back.
Like so many women, she’s dreaded this result. Like so many, she is already a mother of all the children she thought she wanted. Like so many, she doesn’t think she can afford another child. And like so many, she lives near no safe and available options to terminate; she can’t even openly inquire about termination at her ob-gyn’s office. Furthermore, she is tethered to a man she loves, the father of her two children, who recuses himself, emotionally and logistically, from what she might need to move forward either way. Your body, your choice, he tells her, as though those words conferred some totality of support, all the feminist scaffolding a wife could need.
The woman telling this story, “Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood,” is the writer Christa Parravani. The man in question is her husband, Tony. (Close readers of Parravani’s first memoir, “Her,” will know he is the writer Anthony Swofford. You might remember him from his own best-selling memoir, “Jarhead,” and the film adaptation of it.) Parravani tells us she is “a woman who looked from the outside to have it all.” And yet: “I would need to provide for a third child with the negative $75 in my checking account at the end of every month. Rent was well over half my take-home pay. Groceries, heat and water, student loans, credit card bills, car payment and day care claimed more than the rest. Tony paid our phone bill. Most of his money he kept to himself. I had to ask him for money for basics, which he mostly didn’t provide.”
[ Read an excerpt from “Loved and Wanted.” ]
By the time Parravani finds herself panicking in the bathroom, Tony has made and mysteriously lost quite a bit of money. The family has moved to Morgantown, W.Va., where she secures a faculty position in the writing department at West Virginia University; he has the exact same job but at higher pay. It doesn’t keep him there long: He vanishes to Los Angeles for extended periods of time, where he earns an irregular income writing for television, while she teaches, writes and raises their daughters, one of whom comes home from school (parochial) to announce that mommies don’t work.
“Most household tasks and chores fell on me. Night feedings. Bills. Boring paperwork. Someone always needed to be fed or rocked or talked off the ledge of a tantrum,” Parravani writes. “I didn’t have time to be pregnant. I divvied minutes.” Furthermore, there are environmental hazards in the water and soil, and the extent to which their children (and the entire community) might be poisoned remains unknown. The nearest abortion provider, the only one in the entire state, is hours away.
Why doesn’t Tony offer to drive Parravani there? Or wrap his arm around her shoulder and lead her into the Planned Parenthood across the Pennsylvania line in Pittsburgh? She could use the support: She remains scarred by the chants of protesters outside the clinic she visited as a college student, more so than by the procedure itself. Yet Parravani never fully peels back what it means when our partners fail us as gravely as our reproductive health system.
“Reprehending Tony might be briefly satisfying, but to do so is to lose focus, to take a moment in my life when I was handed shame and doubt solely because I was a pregnant woman, and make it about my husband,” she writes. Still, when her mother comes to visit eight months after Parravani’s missed period, and can’t stop cleaning because otherwise she’ll give Tony — in town for a change — a piece of her mind, all I want her to do is put down the vacuum cleaner he doesn’t know how to use and have at it. His varieties of masculine abandonment feel as systemic as Morgantown’s contaminated earth or the region’s desert of reproductive health care. I want her to mine this terrain as deftly as she does the rest.
Parravani never lets us feel that a news item is anything less than terrifyingly, corporeally personal. When she tells us that 53 percent of West Virginian pregnancies are unplanned, it’s not a mere statistic but a rush of grief and fury at the reality of these circumstances — though the progressive women in her circle seem to approach reproductive choice as something to cluck politics about, not the jurisdiction of their own wombs. Her required transvaginal ultrasound is performed in a doctor’s office that pipes in Christian rock; the waiting room reading material is a Bible. Parravani’s 1-year-old daughter has kidney issues, which may have started in utero from the local water supply; West Virginia ranks first nationwide in rate of kidney failure. Her son is born severely jaundiced, double-tied and with a broken clavicle from a hard birth, and only receives proper medical care — a proper diagnosis, even — in California, during a summer stay with Tony. This is how data points are lived; this is the blood that runs every day through one of the reddest states in the nation.
Parravani clearly cherishes her son. But what if her connection to him could have been a choice untangled from these legal — and cultural — limits?
It’s a crisis, not just for Parravani but for all of us. Frustratingly, the book feels as if it was rushed through in the midst of one. Evocative passages of language and story, lucid in context and nuance, slam the brakes at potholes in the narrative. Too many phrases are self-consciously poetic and tangled. At times, I wanted to pour Parravani a cup of tea or a third-trimester glass of wine and ask what she means, to tease out deeper analysis from the layers of emotion disguising it, dressing up half-thoughts in literary flourishes, or tossing a silk scarf of vanity over all she has so valuably bared (“I gave my body to West Virginia”). Parravani’s previous book, “Her,” feels so much more complete, and hardly less mired in crisis: the story of her sisterhood with her troubled twin, their knotty lives braided together until her sister’s fatal overdose.
But in the end, what she has to tell us, and what she is capable of making us feel, outweighs my irritation. What she has done is dissect the complexity of choice, how our own trauma and relationships inform it, as well as policy and access. She reveals the cost to us all when we fail to openly personalize the politics of abortion in America.
“I can both want to have had reasonable access to abortion and love and want my son,” she tells us. “Choice bolsters the miraculous attachment we have to our babies.” I want her to say more. I want the rest of us to say more as well, now more than ever.
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Book Review: ‘Loved and Wanted,’ by Christa Parravani - The New York Times
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