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Eleven Hours

by Lucy S

Pamela Erens’ new novel, Eleven Hours, is the story of two pregnant women whose lives cross paths for a brief time, less than a day. This short book (165 pages) begins with Lore, in the last month of her pregnancy, taking herself to the hospital as she feel the stirrings of labor, a very detailed birth plan in hand. She arrives alone and is attended to by a nurse, Franckline, who is also pregnant, and has seen her fair share of birth plans. In the ensuing eleven hours, Pamela Erens takes us through the moments of a woman’s labor, from start to finish, with precision. Fiction has rarely provided readers such a true account of childbirth.

In these eleven hours, we are exposed to both the exciting and the dull stretches of labor, the ups and downs. Just as one’s mind might wander during any eleven hour period, especially one so full of ebbs and flows as the process of labor, so wander the minds of Franckline, recalling her family in Haiti, her new, second pregnancy; and of Lore, thinking of the failed relationship that has ended in her pregnancy and her being here, alone. Erens’ dexterous writing takes us down different, winding paths to reveal some of each woman’s story. While the lines of their accounts run parallel within the framework of Erens’ novel, these two women, who go through this incredibly intense experience together, never really know each other. Erens combines their narratives beautifully, yet maintains their separateness. They are each important to the other in some way and travel together on this one journey, on this one day, but at the same time, they are alone, with their thoughts, their worries, their histories.

Lore thinks, “how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn’t tell, or told stories that weren’t entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form.”

Erens does not shy away from the mess and panic that childbirth can elicit and so this book is not for the feint of heart, nor, probably, for expectant parents. But Erens is unfailingly honest in giving us a candid picture of this one woman’s experience of childbirth. Despite the fact that certain passages evoke the visceral pain of childbirth, the novel is so well written, the flow of Franckline’s and Lore’s tandem eleven hours so well described, that the book is hard to put down, a striking and gratifying read.

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