“There is an impossible expectation placed on pregnant women in our society: that we are supposed to get on with everything and express only a blossoming sense of joy and anticipation, even as the person we have thought ourselves to be is transfigured and reborn. It was an expectation that made me feel I was particularly difficult and perverse, in a specifically female kind of way that I had never felt before, in my ambivalence toward what was happening to me and within me. The suppression of the darkness that is also a part of pregnancy, I think, actually muted the experience of what was wonderful and affirming about it.”

—	Naomi Wolf in Misconceptions