Word: mother
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...babies in this "natural" way. They can thus avoid what they consider to be the coldly regimented atmosphere of the typical hospital obstetrical service, with its forbidding stirrups and examining tables, medication and anesthesia, enemas and shavings, and the usual separation of husband and wife-to say nothing of mother and infant, who all too often is almost immediately taken from the mother's cradling arms to a nursery. Yet Mickey Johnson did not have her baby at home, a risky practice that many doctors discourage. Instead the happy event took place within a conventional hospital...
Garp himself begins in an act of highly spiced imagination. During World War II, his mother, Nurse Jenny Fields, climbs into bed with a ball-turret gunner who has been lobotomized by a piece of flak. The gunner, Technical Sergeant Garp, dies shortly afterward, leaving only the initials of rank for his son's first name. For Jenny, her one and only sexual experience is a calculated insemination consistent with her independent nature. As she writes in A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography that makes her famous, "I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made...
...novel is strategically seeded with role reversals. Garp, raised on the campus of a New England boys' school where his mother is head nurse, exhibits strong maternal instincts. When his wife decides to have an affair, she behaves with all the distracting caution of the philandering commuter. The most striking sexual suspect is Roberta Muldoon, formerly Robert, a transsexual who once played tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. She is Garp's closest friend and squash partner...
Mary Gordon's Dover Road was actually a heavily Catholic section of Valley Stream, L.I. Her mother, "a nice Catholic girl" and now a legal secretary, has lived in the same house for 58 years. Mary, who is 29, sometimes feels, like Isabel, that the most interesting part of her life is her past. Her father's family were the only Jews in Lorain, Ohio. They managed to send their son to Harvard, but he dropped out and knocked around Europe for a few years. Says Mary: "He once started a girlie magazine called Hot Dog. When...
...fought her family and her teachers to go to Barnard, and later did post-graduate work at Syracuse University. Four years ago, she married a British anthropologist. The idea for Final Payments came from the old neighborhood. "I thought of women of my mother's generation who led sacrificed lives for someone in their family. There is a terrible human need when the body conks out, but no one in my generation gives over his life. I began by wondering what would happen." After the book was turned down by a couple of publishers, Gordon took it around...