A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother: Essays by Anna Prushinskaya
—Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes  |
Shop for Print - $15  Shop for eBooks - $4.99      Shop for Audiobook  Paperback 5″ x 8″ List price: $15 Print / $4.99 ebook ISBN: 978-1-944850-06-7 Publisher: MG Press Release date: November 15, 2017 Language: English DescriptionIn A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother, Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author’s Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, filmmaker Sophia Kruz and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the daily realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media. How will I return to my life? Prushinskaya asks, and answers by returning us to our own ordinary, extraordinary lives a little softer, a little wiser, and a little less certain of unascertainable things. |
Advance Praise
“Anna Prushinskaya’s A Woman is a Woman Until She is a Mother is a frank, courageous, and beautiful meditation on the strange alchemy of migrating from one identity to another.”
—Helen Phillips, author of Some Possible Solutions and The Beautiful Bureaucrat
“Anna Prushinskaya’s essays are maps, are mirrors, are the magical objects lost and found by every wayward traveler in a faraway/familiar land. Every woman’s experience of motherhood is unique, and yet I traced my own footsteps on the paths this marvelous writer laid before me. A lovely book - the kind you find yourself pushing into friends’ hands and bundling up into care packages.”
—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories
“Motherhood is an encounter, a shadow in mirrors, a beast lying low in the grass in the field,’ writes Anna Prushinskaya as she grapples with the strangeness of pregnancy and birth. Russian-born, she swoops across the frontiers of country and motherhood as she contemplates the nature of language, pain, compassion, and the power of a woman’s story. Meditative, curious and intriguing, these essays help us consider whether ‘the things that come with life are worth it.”
—Toni Nealie, author of Miles Between Me
“You are lucky to be holding this book, because in ten or twenty years, you will be able to say, “Anna Prushinskaya? I have the original edition of her first book,” which will impress all your friends because by then Prushinskaya will have won all the awards and prizes, and will have taken her well-deserved place in the canon of early 21st Century literature. But more than that, you are lucky to be holding this book because Prushinskaya is one of the few writers out there who possesses a wholly unique vision: her writing is as concise as it is poetic, her outlook as tender as it is analytical. This is a beautiful book.”
—Juliet Escoria, author of Witch Hunt and Black Cloud
Reviews
“I love this book…I was hungry for this book…”
—Helen Betya Rubinstein, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Heartfelt and honest…full of sincerity.”
—Ashley Supinski, Hippocampus Magazine
“Prushinskaya’s essays are an intriguing compilation of a woman’s flight through child bearing, told with care, pain, and freshness.”
—Surmayi Khatana, The Coil
“An important contribution to the world of women’s stories.”
—Cameron Finch, Hunger Mountain
About the Author
Anna Prushinskaya’s writing has appeared in publications like The Sonora Review, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and others. She received an MFA from Brooklyn College-CUNY, and she lives with her family in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Motherhood continues to shift and surprise her.
