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The I Index

Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood

Bottom of the pile

20

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

23/100

Critics

17/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Christa Parravani

Publisher:

Henry Holt and Co.

Date:

November 10, 2020

A stressed family, an unplanned pregnancy, and a painful, if liberating, awakening from the author of the lauded memoir Her. This is the story of one woman's look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes for their children's lives.

What The Reviewers Say

Lauren Sandler,
New York Times Review of Books
Parravani never lets us feel that a news item is anything less than terrifyingly, corporeally personal.
Kelly Blewett,
BookPage
Ultimately, Parravani is interested in how individual women make reproductive choices in the face of complex geographical, medical and financial circumstances. In tangible and heartbreaking ways, she illustrates how each of these things impacts both her already born daughters and her soon-to-arrive son. In particular, the medical care she receives in West Virginia makes this reviewer cringe.
Emily Bowles,
Library Journal
... luminous, complex.

Publishers Weekly
Parravani exposes motherhood’s serrated edges in this searing exploration of love, autonomy, and abortion.