The Next Chapter

This book should come with a warning: Proceed with caution if you are planning to become a parent. Presented from the perspective of a mother immersed in the initial period of her daughter’s life, Stacey May Fowles’s The Lost Season is equal parts tribute and tribulation. That the memoir summoned contradictory sensations — fatigue and alertness, frustration and euphoria — stored in my personal memory of early motherhood attests to its vivid accuracy.

This narrative is much more than a chronicle of giving birth and taking care of a newborn. To counter the “oppressive force” that insists women “never speak on the inherent realities of mothering,” Fowles plumbs “the unfathomable, unimaginable depth of this incredible physical, emotional, and spiritual experience, one that splits you in two and opens you up wide, making you question everything you knew about yourself and your world, destroying you while also somehow making you whole.” At the same time, she...