How to Brood
My book is here!!!!!
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I can’t believe it, friends: The day is finally here.
More than 13 months after I turned in the final manuscript and endnotes to my editor, and more than 7 years after I thought “Maybe I could write a book about the evolution of parenting?” while working on an ill-fated fellowship proposal, my book is on sale today.
You can buy it in hardcover, digital or audio (read by me!) anywhere you like to get books. Or request it from your library. If you really want to be a pal, write a review and post it at Goodreads and/or Amazon (you don’t have to buy the book there to leave a review). I’ll be trying not to compulsively read these, but they’re super helpful for helping other people find the book.
Oh, and you can come see me in person! Here are the events I have scheduled so far. You’ll find more details, as well as any others that pop up, at my events page.
What I’ve Been Working On
I have several new stories coming out soon that are related to the book. In the meantime, I’ve been yapping on some radio shows and podcasts, which you can hear at these links:
• I talked to the podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood about cooperative caretaking and the myth of “mom brain”
• I was on KQED’s show Forum answering listener calls about animal parenting (let’s not talk about how I had read my emails too quickly and didn’t realize until immediately beforehand that this was live radio OMG)
And you can sample my book by reading excerpts at these sites:
• LitHub, with a nice chunk of the introduction
• The Boston Globe, on the universe (and universality) of motherhood
• McSweeney’s, on meeting a bunch of naked mole rats
Dear Inkfish
What’s it like to publish a book? PS: If you don’t answer this with some sort of animal metaphor I’m going to feel personally betrayed.
Don’t worry! This is the newsletter for advice of questionable relevance from the animal kingdom, and that’s what I’m going to share. But briefly, because I probably have a podcast or something in a few minutes.
There’s one tidbit I gathered early in my research for this book that didn’t make it into the manuscript. Well, there are lots of things that didn’t make it in. But what I’m thinking of now is the brood patch.
This is a phenomenon in certain bird species: When they make their nests, they also lose their feathers over a patch of skin on their belly or chest. Some birds’ feathers fall out on their own. Other birds physically pull them out, such as mallard ducks, which use the fluff to line their nests.
This exposed skin is what will rest on top of their eggs while they’re incubating. With the insulating feathers stripped away, the heat of the parent’s body can better warm the eggs.
Depending on the species and how the parents divide their roles, both parents might have a brood patch, or only the mom. The bird in the photo at the top of this post has its brood patch just peeking through. If you hold a nesting bird belly-up and blow on its feathers (I mean, if some kind of expert does it—please don’t go harass any nesting birds) you can see more of the bare skin:
I’ve always been struck by how this simple fact about some birds makes the metaphor of parenting so literal: To protect their young, they have to strip away their own protective layers and bare their vulnerable chests. The baby has to be close to the heat of the parent’s blood.
This is also how we create, no?
A child, a book, anything we birth and care for: putting it into the world and helping it grow outside of ourselves requires vulnerability. We let others see us a little more closely and uncomfortably. We expose our hearts.
Today the project I’ve nurtured for many years is walking away on its wobbly little legs, and I hope the world is kind to it.
But also, it can’t live here anymore. It was starting to talk back to me.
Congrats! I can’t wait to read it.