Expecting by Chitra Ramaswamy review – the great, crazy strangeness of the pregnant body

This beautifully rendered account by a gay woman updates the standard narrative of pregnancy and lifts it to another sphere, full of poetic language and references from Voltaire to Almodóvar

What to Expect When You’re Expecting is the title of a particular sort of pregnancy self-help book that has been circulating for years on both sides of the Atlantic (originally published in 1984, it is now in its fourth edition). Full of colour pictures and To Do lists, it is also a grim warning of everything that can go wrong for the pregnant body, from the supposed risks of ingesting mayonnaise to amniocentesis. It is in many ways a conservative and rather dated product of a boom industry, full of drawings of well-fed, straight Anglo-Saxon couples.

These days, things have shifted a little. The particular, rather stolid, sometimes jokey, stereotypes of heterosexuals having babies that have saturated the media for decades – remember Knocked Up, Parenthood, the TV show Thirtysomething; Parenting magazine? – seem a world away from the sliding sexual identities of Transparent. Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts, is a whole generation on from, say, Jayne Anne Philips’s MotherKind. Even Tina Cassidy’s Birth, a superb account of the medical history of pregnancy, was written straight up. Nowadays, birth control applies to how one might control making a baby as well as how not to.

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