Heather B. Armstrong. It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009. 258 pages.
There are many awful things about pregnancy, child birth, and infant care; many funny things, too. In It Sucked and Then I Cried, Heather Armstrong shares her story of dealing with each of the above three while battling depression.
It’s an honest book that has some funny moments. I think Armstrong’s whole approach is summed up in one quote from the end of the book. After her nine-month old shoves a wad of cash into her mouth, Armstrong looks at the cashier and says, “No, seriously, I never thought I would become this woman.” That really sums up how many people in her age group and predicament feel: they’ve gone from listening to Morrissey and being creative, articulate young professionals to cleaning up poop. I’m one of them (well, if you scratch Morrissey–that’s Armstrong’s thing, not mine), so I have some empathy for what Armstrong’s going through. She does a good job of communicating both the absurdity and the magic of the pregnancy/birth/infant care cycle.
Armstrong demolishes several myths: that pregnancy is a wonderful, glowy time; that nursing is easy; that making the transition to caring for an infant is easy. She glosses most of the horror with a comedic patina, but is brutally candid about her depression. This is true to life, as admitting her problem with depression was probably difficult, and something that she tried to cover with false optimism.
It’s hard not to root for babies, as this video proves; it’s just as hard not to feel for a pregnant woman, let alone one who’s overcome depression. In theory, I should have loved this book. In practice, though, I went from liking it to being annoyed to losing interest. Mostly this is because of the author’s writing style. I can see how, in small doses, it would be amusing, perfect for a blog that you read for five minutes every day. But page after page gets shrill, repetitious, and…boring.
Here’s a sample that struck me as particularly reprehensible:
This partially ingrown toenail was the most awful partially ingrown toenail there ever was, monumental in its awfulness, and I need to spend the next paragraph talking about just how awful it was, just in case you missed the awfulness that I have already mentioned, It was just so awful, really and very much awful. OH SO AWFUL. And it hurt, and continued to hurt, and in the two seconds since he mentioned it was hurting it hadn’t stopped hurting because it still hurt and IT WAS AWFUL.
I get it–she’s exaggerating the fact that her husband is complaining about an ingrown toenail. It’s just too cutesy for my taste. When she sticks to trenchant, snappy observational humor, the book is good, but when she devolves into this kind of typing, it gets very tired.
Another thing I just can’t get past is the author’s tendency to SCREAM. IN ALL CAPS. ON EVERY PAGE PAGE. SERIOUSLY. Again, this might be an effective literary technique on screen, but on the printed page it is almost as awful as the ingrown toenail. This got annoying pretty quickly, and flipping through the book after I finished confirmed that, on average, she did this two or three times per page. It’s an extremely poor editorial choice that really detracts from her writing.
On the whole, Armonstrong’s done a good thing by sharing her story, since it may help other people who are going through similar problems. There’s a line between blogging and literature, though, and I don’t think this book comes close to crossing that line.
In case you didn’t click the link, here’s the BIG BABY video:
Fun, huh?