Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy

From the author of a Guardian memoir of the year 2022

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to read something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn’t find one.

So, she wrote Expecting.

Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the reader on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one’s life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective that are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.

Ramaswamy bears witness to the experience of pregnancy in an intimate yet expansive book of lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.

Chitra Ramaswamy is an award-winning author and journalist. Her debut book won the Best First Book of the Year prize in Scotland’s National Book Awards and was nominated for the Polari Prize for books by LGBTQ+ writers. Her most recent book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship, won Scotland’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi: ble, and Message From The Skies and recently completed a commission from the Alasdair Gray Archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she is from London and lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two children, and rescue dog.