Loved and Wanted
A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood
by Christa Parravani
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Pub Date Nov 10 2020 | Archive Date Dec 10 2020
Henry Holt & Company | Henry Holt and Co.
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Description
A stressed family, an unplanned pregnancy, and a painful, if liberating, awakening from the author of the lauded memoir Her
Christa Parravani was forty years old, in a troubled marriage, and in bad financial straits when she learned she was pregnant with her third child. She and her family were living in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she had taken a professorial position at the local university.
Haunted by a childhood steeped in poverty and violence and by young adult years rocked by the tragic death of her identical twin sister, Christa hoped her professor’s salary and health care might set her and her young family on a safe and steady path. Instead, one year after the birth of her second child, Christa found herself pregnant again. Six weeks into the pregnancy, she requested an abortion. And in the weeks, then months, that followed, nurses obfuscated and doctors refused outright or feared being found out to the point of, ultimately, becoming unavailable to provide Christa with reproductive choice.
By the time Christa understood that she would need to leave West Virginia to obtain a safe, legal abortion, she’d run out of time. She had failed to imagine that she might have not have access to reproductive choice in the United States, until it was too late for her, her pregnancy too far along.
So she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Keats. And another frightening education began: available healthcare was dangerously inadequate to her newborn son’s needs; indeed, environmental degradations and poor healthcare endangered Christa’s older children as well.
Loved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman’s love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes for their children’s lives.
Advance Praise
"Haunting, wild, and quiet at once. A shimmering look at motherhood, in all its gothic pain and glory. I could not stop reading."
—Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Three Women
“Here is searing testimony from the frontlines of American womanhood. Loved and Wanted is the story of one woman's fight to decide what's best for herself and her family. In gorgeous prose, this memoir simmers with anger at injustice and the fierce love of children. Parravani writes about the complexities of motherhood with warmth, dazzling imagery, and a rogue sense of humor. Her heartbreaking and inspiring story—of seeking abortion and safe childbirth, caring for husband and kids—lays bare a broken system that denies fundamental human rights to women who can't afford to pay for them.”
—Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life
"Christa Parravani is one of our great memoirists. Loved and Wanted is a breathtaking book of life and death. Parravani provides a firsthand account from the front lines of a woman's right to choose. This story is a classic tale of the mountains. A story of how people arrive and leave, struggle and stay, and how they grapple with their ghosts."
—Scott McClannahan, author of The Sarah Book and Crapalachia
"Heavily pregnant, with young children and an absent husband, living in an Appalachian hellscape featuring appalling medical care and white supremacist violence, Parravani writes, 'It occurred to me that I might die… as a woman dies, with child.' This book is a deceptively languid segment of the unending story of women forsaken by misogynistic cultures, religions, corporations, and governments. It is a book that accurately depicts—its brilliant metaphors glittering like diamonds—how much some Americans want women to suffer. Everyone should read this book."
—Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments and Ongoing
"The power of Christa Parravani’s memoir almost eclipses the world of mere words. It is at once a lyrical meditation on motherhood, and a fierce examination of the double bind of pregnancy in a world in which women’s choices are bound, and increasingly threatened, by the moral definitions and feeble politics of men. I want everyone to read it, to see the ways in which she navigates what most of us are never courageous enough to say. The book burrowed into some secret place in me, a place where it will exist not for weeks, or months, or even years, but forever. In my life, I will never forget this book. Read it. This is all I can say. You must read it.”
—Rachel Louise Snyder, award-winning author of No Visible Bruises and What We’ve Lost is Nothing
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781250756848 |
| PRICE | $26.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 224 |
Available on NetGalley
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