Category Archives: Bohjalian

Bohjalian

Bohjalian’s Midwives

“She would recall in the courtroom that tearing the uterus was as easy as tearing damp pasty dough, but she was nevertheless finding it hard to breathe as she worked.”

In Chris Bohjalian’s 1998 novel Midwives, he does two remarkable things. He writes convincingly as a teenage girl (the midwife’s daughter) and he describes the occurrence of birth and death in breathtaking detail. I’ve made a lot of apple pies in my time so that sentence made me squirm while I admired the image he wrote. Were his descriptions compelling to you?