From Amazon
Knocked Up may be a pregnancy journal, but the body part deemed most important by author Rebecca Eckler is certainly not the uterus. "Do you remember anything about these last three months?" Eckler asks her fiancé at the end of her second trimester. "They seem like such a blur to me." Says her beau, "All I remember is you asking, 'Is my ass fat?' 'Is my ass fat?' 'Is my ass fat?'"
Readers' memories of Knocked Up will likely be similar. In the opening scene, the National Post columnist is aghast after drunkenly insisting on having sex with her fiancé without protection. Her pregnancy paranoia turns out to be entirely justified, a turn of events that will have a radical impact on her carefree, girl-about-town lifestyle. Or maybe not--written in the breezy fashion of contemporary chick-lit, Knocked Up is less about profound life changes than about wondering if she'll ever be able to fit into size 26 jeans again. When not obsessing over her caboose, Eckler cracks wise about food urges, bad baby names (Apple?!), and hormonally induced crying jags. She also copes with a quasi-crush on a man she calls Single Cute Guy and a professional rivalry with the Sexy Young Intern who's taking her place at the Post.
Eckler provides plenty of scenes of Sex and the City-style banter with her friends, though few exchanges are as snappy as they need to be. Her writing is sufficiently breezy but rarely funny--clichés are common ("You can quote me on that") and she. Likes. To. Use. One. Word. Sentences. For. Emphasis. Even so, her irreverent disinterest in her own pregnancy sometimes yields amusing moments. "I am never studying another pregnancy book until I absolutely have no choice," she writes. "It will be just like high school. When I start having contractions, I'll cram." In the meantime, Knocked Up blithely pushes some contentious ideas about modern birthing, as when Eckler jokingly cites Vogue to support her choice of a C-section over a vaginal birth: "Once it's in Vogue, it's like the law." Ironically, a more dramatic birth scene would have better served the book. As it stands, the oddly muted climax is hardly enough to justify the 300-plus pages of navel-gazing that precede it. Nevertheless, women who find themselves having to sacrifice lives of fabulosity for modern motherhood may relish Eckler's unorthodox take on a subject that is usually treated with stultifying reverence. --Jason Anderson
About the Author
Rebecca Eckler is one of Canada's most well-known journalists. She has been a columnist with the
National Post, Canada's national newspaper, for five years, including a stint as a New York-based columnist and feature writer. Her work has also appeared in such publications as
Elle,
Fashion,
Lifestyles,
Canadian House and Home and
Mademoiselle. She was the host of the television show
Modern Manners, and has appeared on CTV and CBC television, and on Global television as a reporter, along with numerous stints on radio shows across Canada and the United States.