5 Surprising Things You Didn't Know About Pregnancy

Here are some of the mind-blowing facts I learned in the buzzy new book "Like a Mother"—which is a must-read for any woman who wants to have kids.

Do you remember the first time you had a real talk with female friends about sex, feelings, or bodies? One of the reasons Sex and the City, for all its issues, struck such a chord with its viewers is because of just how purely and raunchily it addressed all three. Breaking into an honest place about the nature of the female experience can be upending and uplifting at once. It could happen at age 13 while listening to music in your bestie’s room or at 42 over a couple of bottles of rosé.

The feeling of female solidarity is a powerful but elusive one. It’s probably partly why the new-this-year Angela Garbes book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy is making such waves. I am 42 and don’t have children, but even my childless friends are recommending it to me.

It is an instantly seminal book. Garbes wrote a 2015 piece titled “The More I Learn About Breast Milk, the More Amazed I Am” which went viral and became the most-read piece in the history of Seattle newsweekly The Stranger. “The nutritional and immunological components of breast milk change every day, according to the specific, individual needs of a baby,” she wrote, thrilling at the fact of this thing she’d learned about the power of the female body.

Like a Mother showcases Garbes’s intellectual curiosity as much as it does her empathy. Unlike a lot of the popular pregnancy books on the market, it neither lectures nor endorses. Primarily, it educates. She’s not afraid to talk about the rawness of her own labor, which didn’t go at all according to her birth plan, nor the pain of her two miscarriages, which she details here. She busts into the nitty-gritty of her own sex life, her C-section, and the things that kept her marriage strong after the birth of her first child. (Hello, chore wheel!)

To break a book as essential as this one—I would rank Garbes right alongside Naomi Wolf, Germaine Greer, and other feminist writers—into mere bullet points would be to do it a disservice, largely because of how personal, funny, and sisterly its author is in her writing style. But she is also an extraordinary researcher and reporter, with a thorough bibliography of every study she cites. It’s worth briefly summarizing a few of the mind-blowing points she makes, although there are so many more that it’s worth checking this book out yourself.