“If a baby is dead, is it said to have been born?”
The main character suffers from placenta previa during her pregnancy. Both her and her husband, Ky, are worried about the survival of the baby. While prepping for her C-section to avoid complications, she remembers her painful childhood and the complications with her own mother. How will she mother her child when she wasn’t mothered herself? Is she prepared? She worries about the challenges she will face after the baby is born and is concerned about mental illness. Will she be like her mother? The secrets she has kept about her own mother and the death of her mother haunt her during and after birth.
“And now the baby lives out in the world, his cord cut: a newborn with a mother whose mother came undone.”
Part of the Inheritance series from Amazon Original Stories, this short story projects an eerie image of a past mother-daughter relationship. Will the cycle between mother and child now be broken?
(Note–This story is told in second person POV. The narrator addresses the reader as “you”.) Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy. Opinions are my own.
Read Publisher’s Weekly article about Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio.
20 Question Interview with Julie Orringer for Oprah readers.
Julie Orrinder discusses how she writes with WriterMag.