Privacy by Molly Young
2025

It’s a short novella-length memoir derived from the journal she kept while pregnant. Her wit sparkles throughout. It’s basically a normal pregnancy, punctuated by her particular sensibility, until the post-pregnancy hemorrhage that almost kills her, which she narrates in a surprisingly brisk and unemotional fashion. Perhaps all that’s occluded here is what’s meant by the title, which puzzled me throughout, until I finished the book and sat pondering the crumbs of my breakfast, suddenly grateful for all the mothers I knew who became mothers without dying. 

It seems difficult to write any kind of memoir, but then also to write any kind of memoir that has a lever regarding how much personal information to include. I have written before how I have come to think that personal writing, or “reality television,” for lack of a better phrase, invites judgment on behalf of the audience/reader, whereas fictionalizing somehow invites empathy. This is not my idea, and I don’t know why this seems to be the case, but it still strikes me as true. That’s to say that Young is able somehow here to disclose personal details of her pregnancy and its aftermath without it being personal, or “too personal,” or personal enough so that it transpires into the kind of “real” performance that invites audience judgment. Perhaps it has something to do with her brisk narration, her rather clear obscurities. Perhaps it’s because it’s more focused on details in the world than her own psychological theater. 

Throughout the book, Young mentions how there appear to be no works of literature that deal with pregnancy, and so this memoir stands as a small corrective. It’s not as if all the details are groundbreaking. There is the routine transformation of the mother’s body from an autonomous being into an animal that exists to provide sustenance to another animal — the rude assertion of nature that occurs while everyone is still living in a semblance of civilization. Routine stuff, but still, it’s made interesting and new by Young’s voice, the details she notices. She collects obscure pregnancy pamphlets and peppers the text with historical flotsam related to her progress. It’s the most normal story of all, until it’s not. 

In the final pages of the book, when the hemorrhage takes place, pregnancy turns into trauma, or rather giving birth is the trauma. While there may not be many books where pregnancy is the underlying narrative, I do think there are books where giving birth is depicted as a traumatic event. Two recent novels spring to mind: Miranda July’s All Fours and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble. In both novels, the mother characters undergo terrible births, and they are (understandably) haunted by this experience throughout the book. It functions as a gigantic, characterological explanatory event, like a personal Nagasaki. 

This isn’t bad per se. I think that both mother characters in these two novels would be more interesting without the trauma-birth story, but that being said, the traumatic birth story does serve as a reminder, that amidst the comedy of pregnancy and child-rearing, or the accidental drudgery of marriage, all of this entertainment floats by on a river of blood, potentially. 

At least that’s how it feels in Young’s zine. That’s how she refers to it. The short book is self-published, and brings to three the number of novella-length nonfictional zines she’s published. It’s a sharply designed, all black, perfect-bound paperback that’s not quite thick enough to weather the kind of aggressively splayed bookreading I prefer, but otherwise it’s a nice object. Young is a successful journalist and book reviewer, having written for the New York Times Magazine for years, and also having done stints at New York magazine and the New York Times Book Review. I think I’ve got all those credentials right. What’s interesting is how despite her consistent success in established legacy media publications, she has continued to publish her own stuff as well. That is, it’s interesting to me, a total nobody. She refers to a meeting with an agent at one point, who throws out wild ideas she could pursue. It’s played for comedy in the book, but it makes one wonder. Did this small book ever get pitched? Why did Young choose to publish it this way? Aside from being glad that it exists, qua book, it’s neat that it exists in this particular way, so tightly envisioned and executed. It’s as if Geoff Dyer and Maggie Nelson had a little sister who knew her way around InDesign. 

The book is available here.