On a journey: Chitra Ramaswamy (right), author of a new book about pregnancy, and her partner Claire
You don’t have to be a mother, or even a would-be mother, to find yourself utterly gripped by journalist Chitra Ramaswamy’s new book, Expecting: The Inner Life Of Pregnancy. As she tells DIVA, on the phone from Edinburgh where she lives with her partner Claire and their young son, it is really a book for everyone, because every one of us has experienced at least one birth – our own.
But to begin with, Ramaswamy wrote the book she had searched for when, newly pregnant, she made a fruitless visit to the pregnancy and parenting section of Waterstones. On the shelves of manuals, what she found missing was “an intellectual and emotional description of the actual experience of being pregnant, pushing aside all the politicking and the dogma, and the prescription and policing of pregnancy, to actually get to the power of the experience”.