How does pregnancy alter the reading and writing mind? I volunteer my own for consideration. While pregnant with my daughter I wrote a 295,233-word Google doc and read very little.
What existed of my attention span was beamed toward texts about gestation. In the 1882 book “Enlightened Woman,” a physician called M. Elna Haverfield suggested the following clever cure for nausea: Drink one cup of coffee first thing in the morning. If that doesn’t work, insert a morphine suppository. A 19th-century manual by the surgeon Pye Henry Chavasse revealed that what we call a “popped” bellybutton was once referred to as a “pouting” bellybutton. And from Nadia Maria Filippini’s “Pregnancy, Delivery, Childbirth” I discovered that the word “placenta” comes from the Latin, without modification, where it means flatbread — suggesting that someone in the distant past had weird ideas about discs of unleavened wheat.
At night I cruised eBay for old pregnancy pamphlets. These were housed under the “Collectibles” tab and sold at bargain-bin prices, being medically obsolete but not, apparently, worthless. Some were published by the U.S. government. Some issued from powdered-milk companies or women’s associations of eccentric ideological bent. They came in pink, blue, yellow, peach. Stork imagery was abundant. Sex was euphemized. Meatloaf recipes were inescapable.
Though the details charmed me, it was the aggregate effect I was after: Each pamphlet existed in irresolvable conflict with one, or often all, of the others. A pamphlet from 1941 encouraged staying active while a booklet from 1943 advised the expectant to rest. One said to avoid soda fountains; another to drink plenty of Coca-Cola. Do not smoke, said pamphlet A; pamphlet B thought it fine to smoke 10 cigarettes per day. Whether it was better to eschew tightfitting garments or wear a girdle depended on which set of stapled pages sat at the top of my bedside pile. The clashing advice formed a din of white noise, leaving me free (I mirthfully concluded) to follow no advice at all. On nights of anxious insomnia I could select a sheaf at random and paddle myself to sleep on its sea of antique knowledge.
The most potent of the reading materials was neither obsolete nor directly concerned with pregnancy, though its “inciting incident” involved childbirth. “The Midnight Disease,” a book published in 2005 by the neurologist Alice Flaherty, combines science and memoir to examine a medical condition known as hypergraphia.
Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write excessively and without obvious purpose or profit. Hypergraphics tend to exhibit flamboyant penmanship and fill every inch of space on a page. They favor colored inks and CAPITAL LETTERS. They write in response to internal rather than external pressures — so, not to achieve tenure or impress girls. And their writing must be coherent. That is, it must rise above sheer orthographic compulsion, must express more than a third grader’s cursive worksheet.
That’s a squishy definition, and Flaherty reserves the label of clinical hypergraphia for those with known or likely temporal lobe abnormalities — the best-understood causes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll and Vincent van Gogh (whose lengthy letters to his brother Theo paralleled periods of feverishly active painting) are among those who may have been affected, along with countless toiling hacks lost to history. Sadly, hypergraphia is not allied with talent.
The engine of “The Midnight Disease” is the author’s own subclinical bout, triggered by the premature birth — and subsequent tragic death — of twin baby boys. For 10 days after the death of her babies, Flaherty was soaked in grief. Then, “as if someone had thrown a switch,” she became inflated with a manic lust for scribbling.
“The sight of a computer keyboard or a blank page gave me the same rush that drug addicts get from seeing their freebasing paraphernalia,” she wrote. “I believed I had unique access to the secrets of the Kingdom of Sorrow, about which I had an obligation to enlighten my — very tolerant — friends and colleagues through essays and letters.”
At the height of her mania, Flaherty rose at 4 a.m. to write. On good days language enveloped her like “a hot wind from the tropics, the sort of wind that propels ships carrying peacock feathers and rubies and apes and incense.” On bad days “words were like a charnel house” through which she searched for the corpses of the people she loved. Whatever the specific texture of the moment’s mood, it was clear to Flaherty that her writing issued from an altered and abnormal state of consciousness. The preoccupation yanked her away from family and impeded her work. She lost interest in music, the visual world — anything beyond written text.
In Flaherty’s case, writing was just one symptom — the twinkling outlier — in a horrific constellation. In the absence of temporal lobe changes, she figured that a mood disorder was the cause of her writing sprees. Postpartum major depression affects roughly one in 10 women; postpartum mania one in a thousand. But manifestations of the two can and do combine. In a poignant symmetry, Flaherty became pregnant again with twins — this time, girls; this time, healthy. Once again her drive to write was amplified. The second round was accompanied by a depression severe enough to require hospitalization, where she discovered that
Psychiatric hospitals are not terrible places to write — they bear certain similarities to writers’ colonies like Yaddo, except that health insurance pays. And except that if you spend too much time in your room writing, “isolative” is entered on your chart.
When Flaherty recovered, she attempted to map the unruly territory of hypergraphic-like behavior. In the book, she notes that highly prolific authors tend to be rebuked for the magnitude of their output, often by other writers. A 1982 review in Harper’s Magazine of Joyce Carol Oates’s 14th novel was titled “Stop Me Before I Write Again: 600 More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates.” (She has published around 50 novels since then.) Writing for The New York Times in 1991, Martin Amis identified John Updike as “a psychotic Santa of volubility” spewing words by the “sackful.” In a 1997 review of a different Updike book, David Foster Wallace quoted an anonymous friend who wondered whether Updike had “ever had one unpublished thought.”
There exists a whole canon of writing about how motherhood influences literary production (negatively, is the consensus), while accounts of any positive correlation between word- and human-generation are scattered and anecdotal. Data points like Danielle Steel (nine children, roughly 200 books) and Elizabeth Gaskell (seven children, more than a dozen novels and novellas, a biography of Charlotte Brontë, some poems) are uncommon.
Flaherty’s descriptions of both the highs (rubies) and lows (charnel houses) of nonstop writing struck me as alien. At no point in my own pregnancy had the motivation to write turned my hands into little Mozart fingers flinging rhapsodically over a keyboard; at no point had I been submerged in a muddy dread. Most of the entries in my Google doc are banal. There are passages about headaches, hosiery, walnuts, stomachaches, laundry. Several pages examine the question of whether a shelter counts as a shelter if it is not weatherproof — at the time my apartment had holes in the ceiling and floor, leading to a sense of all-out attack by the elements — or if penetrability might warrant a semantic downgrade from “shelter” to “dwelling.” The word “email” appears with dispiriting frequency.
While reading “The Midnight Disease” I resisted self-diagnosis and instead wrote — voluminously, and ouroborosly! — about alternative explanations for the growing Google doc. One explanation: The novelty of changing shape required constant documentation, since on most days I felt like a tourist visiting a foreign country located inside my own body. Another explanation: Typing was one of few physical acts not impeded by recent mutation, and so offered a comforting continuity. A third explanation: hormones. (Indeed, after pregnancy, I began to accept “hormones” as the answer to any mystery of human behavior.)
A final explanation occurs to me only now, as my daughter watches the descent of a dust mote as though it were the finale of “The Sopranos”: Months before she came out, a large portion of my brain was already and permanently ceded to thoughts of this incipient being, and I experienced the world with heightened sensitivity in anticipation of her perspective. Hours and days were logged as though the act of articulating existence might increase its bioavailability to a person stuck in utero. Much of that Google doc boiled down to: This is what you’re in for, my love.
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