How a Conservative Writer Goes Woke

Tara is still silent. She’s staring down at the spot on the floor were Kalima began her labor. She’s thinking about something Denver told her, that one time when he was giving a woman a prenatal exam, a few weeks before her due date, and he put his fingers through her cervix to feel if the head was engaged, he felt a tiny hand curl around his finger, through the sac. She’s remembering the day, just around this time last year, when she first felt that fluttering in her stomach. She was three months pregnant then.

I have read Joyce Maynard’s books all the way back to her very first novel Baby Love, and I finally know why I felt compelled to read everything she’s ever written. Maynard was supposed to be a conservative writer. Everything she was and felt was conservative.  But how does a writer remain conservative if living a life of complete isolation in the woods like JD Salinger is not an option? First, you have to make a living, and that often means writing for the periodicals. Today, Maynard could have become a conservative mommy blogger but in the 1980s and 1990s she had to write for the left-leaning press. You also end up becoming part of the literary scene, and again, there’s no place for conservatives there. You can hold your own as a mature, authoritative writer but as a very young woman, you are doomed to having to parrot lefty lines if you want people not to shun you.

Before all this happened, though, Maynard wrote her first, most sincere novel that is a hymn to motherhood.

“A man never really knows what it is to love a woman until she’s had his child.”

I can’t remember reading anywhere else such an exalted literary description of breastfeeding as I did in this novel. This doesn’t mean that Baby Love shies away from the heavy physical toll of motherhood. The novel describes everything honestly but does it from the point of view that motherhood is the pinnacle of existence.

Right now, for instance, Sandy may be upset about Mark coming home drunk. The artist and his wife (his friend? Why did he call her his friend?) may be having some kind of troubles… Tara may be living in a house full of bad vibrations, with a mother who, at this moment, is banging on the bathroom door saying, “Nothing but grief, do you hear me?” But the main thing is, all of these people have their baby, or they’re going to have their baby. That makes everything else seem small.

Baby Love is not a happy-clappy novel. Maynard’s characters live in a world where sex has been cheapened, women are degraded, and babies are cast off at will. The only people who manage to revel in the joys of bringing life to the world are members of a hippy birth cult from Georgia and a couple who thoughtlessly aborted and now pine for a child.

She has begun to understand—though she’s still nine months away from being a parent—why it is that people with children are often so conservative.

The novel was published in 1981, and Maynard shows that a terrible rift had occurred between women who pine for babies and men who no longer know what their role in the arrangement is supposed to be.

There are characters in Baby Love who don’t want children but they are monstrous, perverse. The worst one of them preformed an abortion on a woman, killing her in the process.

There are technical flaws in the book, and you can see that Maynard was inexperienced when she wrote it. Some of the chapters are very short, and the narrative feels choppy. Other than this, however, Baby Love is Maynard’s most talented work because she wrote it before her brain was marinated in treacly wokeness.