Midwives

Midwives

by Chris Bohjalian
Midwives

Midwives

by Chris Bohjalian

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Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This modern classic from the author of The Flight Attendant is a compulsively readable novel that explores questions of human responsibility that are as fundamental to our society now as they were when the book was first published. A selection of Oprah's original Book Club that has sold more than two million copies.

On an icy winter night in an isolated house in rural Vermont, a seasoned midwife named Sibyl Danforth takes desperate measures to save a baby’s life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of stroke. But what if—as Sibyl's assistant later charges—the patient wasn't already dead? The ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt, forcing Sibyl to face the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience. Exploring the complex and emotional decisions surrounding childbirth, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the very best novels ever do.
 
Look for Chris Bohjalian's new novel, The Lioness!

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781400032976
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/13/2002
Series: Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 47,422
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

About The Author
CHRIS BOHJALIAN is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-three books, including Hour of the Witch, The Red Lotus, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, which has been made into an HBO Max limited series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; and The Double Bind. His novels Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers were made into movies, and his work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. He is also a playwright (Wingspan and Midwives). He lives in Vermont and can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Litsy, and Goodreads, @chrisbohjalian

Hometown:

Lincoln, Vermont

Date of Birth:

August 12, 1961

Place of Birth:

White Plains, New York

Education:

Amherst College

Read an Excerpt

Throughout the long summer before my mother's trial began, and then during those crisp days in the fall when her life was paraded publicly before the county--her character lynched, her wisdom impugned--I overheard much more than my parents realized, and I understood more than they would have liked.

Through the register in the floor of my bedroom I could listen to the discussions my parents would have with my mother's attorney in the den late at night, after the adults had assumed I'd been sleeping for hours. If the three of them happened to be in the suite off the kitchen my mother used as her office and examining room, perhaps searching for an old document in her records or a patient's prenatal history, I would lie on the bathroom floor above them and listen as their words traveled up to me through the holes that had been cut for the water pipes to the sink. And while I never went so far as to lift the receiver of an upstairs telephone when I heard my mother speaking on the kitchen extension, often I stepped silently down the stairs until I could hear every word that she said. I must have listened to dozens of phone conversations this way--standing completely still on the bottom step, invisible from the kitchen because the phone cord stretched barely six feet--and by the time the trial began, I believe I could have reconstructed almost exactly what the lawyer, friend, or midwife was saying at the other end of the line.

I was always an avid parent watcher, but in those months surrounding the trial I became especially fanatic. I monitored their fights, and noted how the arguments grew nasty fast under pressure; I listened to them apologize, one of them often sobbing, and then I'd wait for the more muffled (but still decipherable) sounds they would make when they would climb into bed and make love. I caught the gist of their debates with doctors and lawyers, I understood why some witnesses would be more damning than others, I learned to hate people I'd never met and whose faces I'd never seen. The state's medical examiner. The state's attorney. An apparently expert midwife from Washington, D.C.

The morning the judge gave the jury its instructions and sent them away to decide my mother's fate, I overheard her attorney explain to my parents what he said was one of the great myths in litigation: You can tell what a jury has decided the moment they reenter the courtroom after their deliberations, by the way they look at the defendant. Or refuse to look at him. But don't believe it, he told them. It's just a myth.

I was fourteen years old that fall, however, and it sounded like more than a myth to me. It had that ring of truth to it that I heard in many wives'--and midwives'--tales, a core of common sense hardened firm by centuries of observation. Babies come when the moon is full. If the boiled potatoes burn, it'll rain before dark. A bushy caterpillar's a sign of a cold winter. Don't ever sugar till the river runs free.

My mother's attorney may not have believed the myth that he shared with my parents, but I sure did. It made sense to me. I had heard much over the past six months. I'd learned well which myths to take to my heart and which ones to discard.

And so when the jury filed into the courtroom, an apostolic procession of twelve, I studied their eyes. I watched to see whether they would look at my mother or whether they would look away. Sitting beside my father in the first row, sitting directly behind my mother and her attorney as I had every day for two weeks, I began to pray to myself, Please don't look at your shoes, please don't look at the judge. Don't look down or up or out the window. Please, please, look at me, look at my mother. Look at us, look here, look here, look here.

I'd watched the jurors for days, I'd seen them watch me. I'd counted beards, I'd noted wrinkles, I'd stared beyond reason and courtesy at the way the fellow who would become the foreman had sat with his arms folded across his chest, hiding the hand disfigured years earlier by a chain saw. He had a thumb but no fingers.

They walked in from the room adjacent to their twelve chairs and found their seats. Some of the women crossed their legs at their knees, one of the men rubbed his eyes and rocked his chair back for a brief second on its rear legs. Some scanned the far wall of the courtroom, some looked toward the exit sign above the front door as if they realized their ordeal was almost over and emancipation was at hand.

One, the elderly woman with white hair and a closet full of absolutely beautiful red flowered dresses, the woman who I was sure was a Lipponcott from Craftsbury, looked toward the table behind which the state's attorney and his deputy were sitting.

And that's when I broke down. I tried not to, but I could feel my eyes fill with tears, I could feel my shoulders beginning to quiver. I blinked, but a fourteen-year-old girl's eyelids are no match for the lament I had welling inside me. My cries were quiet at first, the sound of a mournful whisper, but they gathered fury fast. I have been told that I howled.

And while I am not proud of whatever hysteria I succumbed to that day in the courtroom, I am not ashamed of it either. If anyone should feel shame for whatever occurred that moment in a small courthouse in northeastern Vermont, in my mind it is the jury: Amidst my sobs and wails, people have said that I pleaded aloud, "Look at us! Oh, God, please, please look at us!" and still not one of the jurors would even glance in my mother's or my direction.

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, author biography, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Chris Bohjalian's Midwives. We hope they will give you a number of new angles from which to consider this enthralling and provocative novel, a gripping combination of courtroom thriller, domestic drama, and novel of ideas that adds up to a lyrical and suspenseful work of art.

Interviews

Q: How do you react when you hear your book being compared to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird?

A: It's tremendously flattering, since To Kill a Mockingbird is a magnificent novel: It is deeply moving and beautifully written, and it offers one of the more wistful and lovely voices in modern literature. Moreover, I have cherished the book for almost a quarter century now: I read it first when I was 13, and I had just moved from New York to Miami. I didn't know a soul, and that book was part of a precious group that kept me company my first autumn in Florida. Today it remains one of a small handful of books I've read again and again.

Q:A: Literary influences, I presume. And certainly Harper Lee is one because of her extraordinary novel. When I read her book as a 13-year-old, I first realized the power of the first person in fiction. Until I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm not sure I had ever been cognizant of the role voice plays in narrative. Others? John Irving, because he writes fiction that is rich with moral ambiguity, yet never allows a story to drift beyond his characters' reach. And Joyce Carol Oates, because she simply writes and writes and writes -- and never seems to shy away from a risk in perspective or plot or subject matter.

Q: I see that you worked briefly for a New York City advertising agency. What was that experience like?

A: It wasn't unpleasant, and I never minded going to pricey restaurants with clients for lunch. I was an account executive. Of course, I also left New York advertising when I was 25 years old in 1986, so I escaped before anyone had dared to give me any real responsibility. And so while there are certainly novelists in this world who can point to successful and famous (or successful and annoying) ad campaigns on which they'd worked...I'm not one of them.

My favorite moments? Probably the brainstorming sessions for ScotTissue, when a group of intelligent adults would sit around a conference room table and try and figure out how to convince people to use more bathroom tissue.

And the fact is, I was always writing fiction -- even then. I would write from 5am to 7am, and then Monday and Tuesday nights after dinner. I wrote my first novel that way.

Q: How has your life changed since Midwives was picked as Oprah's November Book Club selection? A: I hope my life doesn't change -- at least not the nuts and bolts that comprise my day. I love my life. I live in a century-old Victorian village house in Vermont, and I have a wonderful family. I have breakfast every day with my kindergarten-aged daughter, and I meet her when she gets off the school bus in the afternoon. I have plenty of time to write.

But I love the idea that considerably more people than I ever imagined are now reading my work. I think most novelists are, on some level, exhibitionists: We write to be read. And so I'm thrilled with the increase in readership.

And what I find most interesting -- and more flattering than I can tell you -- is the notion that I'm on this select list with the likes of Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman, and Wally Lamb. I never in my wildest dreams expected that.

Q: What is the best part of living in an 1898 farmhouse in rural Vermont?

A: I love the clapboard and slate that comprise the house, but more than that I love the community. My wife and I were in our mid-twenties when we arrived here, and we'd never owned a house. We came here straight from a 320-square foot co-op in Brooklyn Heights. We wouldn't have made it through our first winter here were it not for our neighbors. They took us under their wings and taught us what we'd need to get by: Everything from stacking wood so it would dry properly, to making sure we knew the library hours on those short, dark days in January.

Introduction

On a cold and icy winter night in rural Vermont, an experienced midwife named Sibyl Danforth struggles with a difficult birth. Forced to remain indoors because of the poor weather conditions, Sibyl can't call the hospital because the phones are down, and can't drive her struggling patient to the nearest hospital because the roads are slick with ice. After hours of unproductive labor, the pregnant woman appears to die from a stroke, and Sibyl has no choice but to perform an emergency cesarean, with a kitchen knife, to deliver the baby -- a healthy boy.

Following this miraculous birth, a terrible question arises: What if the woman was still alive when Sibyl cut her open? There were two witnesses to the scene of birth and death. One was the pregnant woman's husband, the other, Sibyl Danforth's inexperienced apprentice. Shortly after the death, both witnesses claim that the midwife, not the birthing, took Charlotte's life. They believe that she was still alive when Sibyl made the decision to operate. Sibyl is subsequently accused of operating on a living woman and killing her own patient through hemorrhagic shock.

Seen through the keen and youthful eyes of Sibyl Danforth's 14-year-old daughter, Connie, Sibyl's fight to defend her choices that cold winter evening forces readers to question definitions of justice and legal culpability. Midwives is both a literary novel and a suspenseful courtroom drama that mesmerizes readers from beginning to end. Please join us as we welcome Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives.

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