Thoughts while giving head

Susan Minot's new book, "Rapture," may put many women off the idea of giving the next blow job.

By David Bowman

Susan Minot thinks too much.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for an acclaimed novelist and screenwriter (“Evening,” 1998; Bertolucci’s 1996 film “Stealing Beauty”). But it can get in the way when it comes to the subject of her latest book, “Rapture.” The 116-page novella documents a 12-minute blow job, in Manhattan, between two on-again/off-again lovers.

In oral-sex prose circles, “Rapture” is matched only by Harold Brodkey’s epic short story “Innocence,” wherein a young male protagonist gives an account of his struggles to bring a so-called frigid girl to orgasm using his yap.

“But mostly Brodkey’s narrator is just thinking about the girl,” Minot says over the phone from her home on an island off the coast of Maine. “Him trying to get her to have an orgasm. What’s going on in his mind? I don’t know if we’re really getting the story.” Then she adds, “Men never write about themselves when they describe sex. Why didn’t James Joyce write Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from a man’s point of view? I don’t think men really want to explain themselves.”

So Minot threw down the gauntlet, and examined both the male and female reactions to getting and giving head. We’ll start with Minot’s blowee, Benjamin, an indie film producer in his 20s who is having an afternoon suck by his former production designer, Kay. He sits back on Kay’s bed and tries to enjoy the “pleasant sensation” of her wet mouth, but the sensations are not “making it up to his head.” He’s thinking about other times when he was thinking about other women. He’s thinking about how often he has sexually and emotionally betrayed Kay. He’s thinking about his well-heeled fiancée, Vanessa. He hears a distant plane and considers that one seldom notices planes flying over Manhattan. (“Rapture” was written pre-Sept. 11.) “I couldn’t have written that now,” Minot says. “It would be a whole different thing.”

Benjamin also remembers a Lou Reed song about “playing football for the coach.” He pictures other women giving him blow jobs in other situations. (He’s just remembering these encounters. He doesn’t do something as crude as fantasize that the woman bobbing her head below him is someone else, like say Rosanna Arquette with her delicious pouty lips.) Not that Benjamin doesn’t think about movie stars while Kay is going down. He pictures Monica Vitti’s high heels in “L’Avventura.” He pictures a grimacing male head from some old Ed Wood movie.

OK, let’s go with that for a moment. Let’s say it is possible for a healthy man to consider an Ed Wood movie during a heterosexual blow job. How did Susan Minot come up with that image? What research did she do to get into a man’s head?

“I asked around,” Minot says. “You try to pick details up here and there. The sexes have different attitudes toward sex. The sexes have different anatomies — that’s no big surprise — there’s going to be differences. But what exactly are they?”

Well, Ben does seem to do an awful lot of daydreaming for a man in his position, I venture. “That’s where you suspend your disbelief a little,” Minot says. “There is a lot popped into those 12 minutes. Hopefully eight of them were without thought. I tried to convey the way he tries to empty his mind or the oddness of the way things pop in.”

Minot laments the impossibility of turning electric currents in the brain into language. “Words take too much time. The thoughts that are articulated go by like an electric flash. Something that requires three sentences can be a half-second image. Or feeling. Or impression. Words don’t quite get at the fragmentation, the rapid fire, of thought.”

True, but guys seldom consider Ed Wood movies during fellatio unless the woman gets careless with her teeth. On the other hand, Kay’s thoughts while giving head are no less strange. Although we shouldn’t assume they are autobiographical (“I’ve never tried to remember an Oscar Wilde quote during sex,” Minot says), they should at least resonate with Minot’s gender. Kay fantasizes about “an oil rig on a dusty Texan flatland” pumping up and down.

Talk about phallic symbols! “You have to have humor in there,” Minot insists. “It just doesn’t work without it.”

No wonder Kay feels “the absurdity of sex like a wink.” Like Benjamin, Kay also thinks about other lovers — in particular how emotionally unsatisfying they were. When Kay finally begins to concentrate on the erect penis she has between her lips, she realizes that she is giving worship to Benjamin. She then considers how alien a penis is. (“It had taken her years of familiarity to develop a fondness for it.”)

She then remembers a man, not Benjamin, looking down at his hard-on and feeling surprise. Finally, Kay considers the paradox of sex. She finds that “her slavelike posture” is arousing to her. She imagines Benjamin saying crude things to her. Minot doesn’t say what those words are. At least a reader finally gets a sense of the down and dirtiness of sex, even if Minot is too refined to enunciate the language in Kay’s mind herself.

But then, Susan Minot is not Karen Finley. Minot is too interested in the abstract regions of eroticism to talk dirty. For example, Minot mentions an aborted plan to put some photographs she uses for her watercolors on the Knopf Web site to promote “Rapture.” “They’d be pictures of what’s going on in these people’s minds while they’re having sex. So any image that pops in is justified. So I collected a little group of photos.”

Are they erotic? I ask.

“No.” She pauses. “There are some. Slightly. Feet and bodies, but not erotic. A chair on the lawn.”

I suspect that a chair on a lawn is a little too abstract to be sexy for most Americans. But it was audacious to structure a book around a blow job. “It was really going to be a short story,” Minot explains. “Four or five pages based on the idea of two people having sex and the things going on in their minds at the same time. But it expanded. Twelve minutes expanded into 116 pages. I realized the situation was an opportunity to explore two different personalities’ attitudes toward sex and love.”

She adds, “One thing about sex is there are many different experiences going on. On one level, there is the physical, which is difficult to convey, which can be wonderful and transporting. It can also be frustrating and not happening. It doesn’t always go smoothly.”

The end of the encounter between Kay and Benjamin does not go smoothly on the psychic level. In fact, it’s devastating. This was not a shared blow job between steadfast lovers. Benjamin is an emotional con man, and Kay is a sucker in more ways than one. She has become so enthralled by Benjamin’s penis that when he finally, finally, finally comes in her mouth, she has an out-of-body experience, and after swallowing Ben’s come tells him, “That was worship.”

Benjamin sees his ejaculation as the ultimate existential act. A novel that began as an exploration of gender perceptions of sex has turned into a book about what it is like to suck the cock of a truly hideous man.

“During the first draft I was really trying to stick with what was going on in their heads without any explanatory description at all,” Minot says. “In the same way when you’re talking to someone you don’t re-describe where you live. This was a little too obscure in a way. It left a reader a little floating above who these people are. I had to fit in slivers that would ground the characters more.”

The “slivers” Minot slips in at the end make Benjamin sound so chilly you expect him to whip out a razor and slit Kay’s throat. He’s no Mac the Knife, but when women read the last two sentences in the book, they will probably be chilled.

Perhaps fellow Maine resident Stephen King imparted some dark psychic influence on Minot’s soul. “Yes, ‘Rapture’ is a horror story,” Minot says. “It definitely is. Many love affairs are.” She then gives a healthy horselaugh. “They can be as devastating as death and war.”

: David Bowman is the author of the novel "Bunny Modern" and the nonfiction book "This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of the Talking Heads in the 20th Century." More David Bowman

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“The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog”: Not kids’ stuff

Two new young adult novels are smarter, better-written and more emotionally complex than most adult fiction

By Laura Miller

Topics:What to Read, Books, The Fault in Our Stars, John Green, Fiction, Young Adult Books, Editor's Picks

Why should you, an adult, bother with a novel intended for an audience aged 14 to 18? If you’re among the ever-growing adult readership for YA (young adult) fiction, you’re probably not even asking that question anymore. And no doubt John Green, whose most recent YA novel, “The Fault in Our Stars,” became a bestseller on Amazon even before he finished writing it (pre-orders were enabled when he settled on a title), doesn’t especially need readers with the legal right to vote. But if you were to skip “The Fault in Our Stars” — or another new novel, by YA luminary Meg Rosoff, “There Is No Dog” — because you assume that such books are less intelligent, well-written or emotionally complex than their adult counterparts, you would be most miserably mistaken.

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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Robert Harris’ sci-fi thriller, ripped from the business headlines

A hedge fund's efforts to generate huge profits backfires in Robert Harris' "The Fear Index." Wait, this is fiction

By Andrew Leonard

(Credit: Dr. Jost Hindersmann)

Topics:Science Fiction and Fantasy, Books, Fiction

Most thrillers do not send me hustling off to Wikipedia for a refresher course in the Stoic philosophy of the first century A.D. Greek sage Epictetus. But that’s where I found myself before commencing this review of “The Fear Index,” by Robert Harris. I wanted to be sure I was properly grounded before straying into treacherous territory: the nature of being in our phantasmagorical high-finance, high-tech era.

I certainly had no time to brush up while actually reading the novel. “The Fear Index” is a perfect exemplar of the species “taut thriller.” It’s a book whose pages cannot be turned fast enough; a mystery with just a dash of science fiction and plot twists ripped from the business news headlines of the past year. Beware taking this book to bed with you, because you will stay up too late. (And your dreams will be queasy.)

But in the haste to turn those pages lies a danger: the chance that you might miss how surprisingly profound “The Fear Index” is, in its contemplation of modern financial markets and the “digitalization” of modern life. With his previous novelistic excursions to ancient Rome (“Pompeii,” “Imperium”), and reimaginings of history (“Fatherland” — set in a Germany where Hitler won World War II), Robert Harris long ago proved himself capable of mixing high intelligence with action and a swiftly moving movie-script-ready plot. “The Fear Index” takes his game to the next level: It is a riveting meditation on the reality of now, complete with a trail of bodies and streaks of madness — both algorithmic and human.

Which brings us back to Epictetus. The heart of “The Fear Index” is the story of how a hedge fund’s attempts to generate unprecedentedly huge financial returns from stock market bets executed by a super-smart computer program go horribly wrong. (Sound familiar? Didn’t we just live through that?) The program is the brainchild of physicist Alexander Hoffmann, and the key to its successful operation is its ability to sniff out traces of fear in the markets. Where there’s fear, there’s volatility, and where’s there volatility, there is the opportunity to cash in.

About a third of the way through the novel, Hoffmann explains to a group of prospective investors (the 1 percent of the global 1 percent!) that the times are ripe for a trading strategy based on fear, because contemporary society has never been so fearful, a fact for which we can blame our online, networked lives.

“Our conclusion is that digitalization itself is creating an epidemic of fear, and that Epictetus had it right: we live in a world not of real things but of opinion and fantasy. The rise in market volatility, in our opinion, is a function of digitalization, which is exaggerating human mood swings by the unprecedented dissemination of information via the Internet.”

Epictetus nailed it. The mood-swingingness of our universe is a truth apparent to anyone who follows the zigs and zags of modern financial markets (or the Republican primary race, for that matter). Computer-driven trading strategies are not reacting to fundamental economic realities; they’re bouncing out buy and sell orders every nanosecond based on price shifts that are themselves generated by emotional reactions to news headlines. A German foreign minister says something nasty about Greece, and markets plunge as London, New York and Shanghai all freak out. Moments later, a soothing press from a central banker sends prices skyrocketing again.

It’s a crazy way to run an economy. And it’s not fiction. Harris underlines this point by interpolating into the plot actual testimony before Congress by current Securities Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro explaining the notorious “Flash Crash” of May 2010. On May 6, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 1,000 points in a matter of minutes before suddenly rebounding. Computers were largely to blame. More such shenanigans are on the way! It’s a sign of how murky our digitally mediated markets are now, how inscrutable to human understanding, that science fiction offers just about as good an explanation of what is going on at the New York Stock Exchange as do the most highly paid market analysts.

Epictetus had it easy. We are no longer capable of understanding what we have wrought. That’s a job only the algorithm can do.

A new graphic novel depicts a hapless fashionista who gets accused of funding terrorism

By Tess Taylor, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Fiction, Books

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

In this funny, sometimes sobering tale of the American Dream gone wrong, Boyet Hernandez, a fey-but-straight Filipino fashionista, arrives in the U.S. in 2002 to set his sights on the fashion world. He’s got a fresh degree from FIM, the Fashion Institute of Makati, a sewing machine, and a small stipend from his parents back home. Possessing only the proverbial dollar and a dream, he’s determined to hang his own clothing line on the gilded runway. But due to a combination of naiveté and blind ambition, Hernandez, who was raised Catholic, has the misfortune to accept funding from the wrong patron: the flamboyant and charismatic Ahmed Qureshi — an “angel” investor with some sartorial sense, mysterious millions, and a rather-too-vague global business.

The rest is history, so to speak, recounted from prison, a no man’s land that’s easily parsed as Guantánamo or one of its ugly cousins. As “From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant” unfolds, Boyet, or Boy, as he’s called, is charged with consorting with terrorists, perhaps more. (In the mode that’s become uncomfortably familiar, it’s not really clear what he’s there for or how long he’ll stay.) Mustering his courage and earning a pen and paper for good behavior, he gives us a tour of prison living, recounting the twists of fate that brought him to be charged with being an enemy of America. As an ingénue caught in terrorism’s ugly web, Boyet poses as the friendly, gossipy voice of all that has gone wrong with deportation and detainment.

With flashing but surely sharp scissors, Gilvarry’s plot cuts some strategic holes through the horror of the last decade. And at its best moments the absurdism produces effects as shimmery and strange as the fashion garments that Boy hungers after. We take the ride with the unfortunate kid, whose name reminds us that he could be almost anyone. What would it be like for an ambitious fashion-minded not-quite-grown-up to find himself in some dark island prison? There’s something quite remarkable about this Yves St. Laurent–loving voice narrating its own fall into the grungy uncomfortable cells, and there’s comedy — albeit sad comedy — to be gained from a suspected terrorist spending all of his imprisonment pining after a copy of W magazine. There is, of course, something dangerous, too, about this gambit: It’s simply too airy to match its subject. In the end, when the toll is exacted, Gilvarry’s project feels like a well-crafted velouté that just about evaporates. Fashion is all well and good as a way in to make light, but in the end, torture is a heavy subject for comedy.

I couldn’t help thinking of Camus’s “The Stranger,” a completely different sort of prison narrative, to be sure, and wishing for a little more of its masterful gravitas. That said, is the fact that Gilvarry is brave enough to make fun of torture a sign that our national flirtation with torture is receding or passed? As readers, we may hope so, but a return to innocence on such a subject now seems as unreal as a W photo shoot.

: Tess Taylor is a New York writer working on a book of short stories. More Tess Taylor

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The cruel truth about love

A new novel sheds a depressing light on romance as it explores one couple's inability to connect

By Heller McAlpin, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Fiction, Books

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

Insecurity and uncertainty rule the day in David Szalay’s third novel, “Spring,” which zeroes in on an uneasy, fledgling relationship between two woefully up-in-the-air 30-somethings in present-day London. Canadian-born Szalay, anointed one of the 20 best British novelists under 40 by the Telegraph in 2010, doesn’t shy away from anything, including awkward sex, in his vivisection of this unpromising affair. The result is an intense portrait of the challenging complexity of really connecting with someone. In some ways it’s like a bleak answer to Alain de Botton’s “On Love,” a more playful, whimsical novel about the often painful vicissitudes of romantic relationships.

Szalay’s main character, James, is a born entrepreneur and risk taker who has made and lost several fortunes since he decided to skip university at 17 — including, on paper at least, a multimillion-pound killing on an Internet start-up that succumbed to the dot-com bust. Now he’s involved in shady horse racing fixes, though he finds himself no longer yearning for extravagant wealth so much as middle-class stability, even in his personal life. Unfortunately, he’s a poor judge of character. This leads him into business dealings with a stalker; a sleazy, ultra-conservative horse trainer; and a self-destructive misfit schoolmate. It also contributes to his persistent, hopeless pursuit of skittish Katherine Persson, a Cambridge University graduate who is currently working in a posh Park Lane hotel, in a dissatisfying managerial job that’s intellectually beneath her, with vague hopes of someday opening her own resort. Katherine, separated from her philandering photographer husband, Fraser King — whom she met while he was staking out a celebrity in the hotel lobby — is uncertain how she feels about Fraser or James.

James worries constantly “that things are not okay,” his moods fluctuating with Katherine’s willingness to see him. Even when she is brutally honest about her wishy-washy feelings, James somehow fails to recognize that things are neither OK nor destined to be. She dodges his kisses and pares down planned weekends together to “the pathetic rind of Sunday evening.” Worse, she greets his early confession of love with a series of sighs and “several frozen seconds” of silence before responding, “I can’t say the same, James. I can’t say the same.” Szalay captures both the clueless nature of infatuation (love is blind) and a disconnection so profound that nothing transmits between this couple without static and distortion.

Fortunately, flashbacks to Katherine’s initial passion for her husband and James’ high-flying days whizzing around town in a new Aston while checking in on his bankers and tech teams “to make sure everything was okay” let some air into what might otherwise be a suffocating narrative. So, too, do deft switches among the various characters’ perspectives, including that of the morally bankrupt horse trainer, who seems to have wandered in from a Dick Francis novel.

As T. S. Eliot noted in “The Waste Land,” there’s a cruelty to spring, “mixing / Memory and desire.” Szalay turns vernal rejuvenation into a source of further sadness, “the way everything is moving on, starting something new.” Even the changeable spring weather is, like Katherine, “still making up its mind what to do.” This study of frustration and ambivalence — of a woman who worries about passion being a thing of the past for her and a man unable to feel his feelings, never mind express them — is insightful but (sigh) depressing.

: More Heller McAlpin

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The teen mom dilemma

A memoir and a novel both provide fresh, personal takes on the problems of young pregnancy

By Amy Benfer, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Books, Fiction, Nonfiction

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

Eleanor Crowe, the fictional protagonist of Han Nolan’s novel “Pregnant Pause,” the daughter of missionaries, likes smoking, drinking and “base-jumping” (leaping off tall places with a parachute). She has, according to her boyfriend, Lam, “a cute way about her that guys like and girls are jealous of,” not “dumb-pretty” but “smart-pretty, like sexy-lawyer pretty.”

Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir “The Pregnancy Project,” soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

When Eleanor announces she is pregnant at 16, it is taken for granted that “her future” can’t include a child until well after college and a suitable marriage. When Gaby, the youngest daughter of a woman who has seven children between the ages of 14 and 35, and 31 grandchildren by the time Gaby is in her early teens, does the same, it is greeted as the expected outcome for a girl like her.

Abortion isn’t an option considered by either girl: “[M]y parents would more likely kill me if I had an abortion than if I were just pregnant, because that’s very against their religion,” says Eleanor (emphasis mine). Gaby, who describes herself as “very pro-life” says she “really had no idea what Planned Parenthood did” until she walks into their office at 16; after reading their literature, she decides it is “designed to make girls feel okay about getting abortions.” But while Eleanor’s pregnancy is real, Gaby’s is not: As part of her senior project, she decided to fake a pregnancy, with the help of her boyfriend, Jorge, her mother, the school superintendent, and a belly sculpted from clay and padded with fabric.

Each girl faces both stereotypes and discrimination: some quite similar, others inflected by each girl’s very different class and cultural expectations. Although Eleanor’s parents work with African AIDS orphans as their life’s work, they see their daughter’s pregnancy as shameful. Eleanor and Lam marry, are given summer jobs at the camp his parents run to force obese children to lose weight, and are paid with lodging in a “one-room cabin heated with wood, with the kitchen up the hill in the main house, and the bathroom a hornet-infested latrine six cabins away” — not exactly comfortable for a pregnant woman who visits the latrine several times a night. As part of the deal, Eleanor has to “pretend I’m twenty (yeah, lying — what a great example), and we have to be married and pretend the marriage came before the baby, so it doesn’t look like I got knocked up by accident or anything.” Another counselor, Jen, mocks her for her perceived stupidity about birth control and alleged sluttiness — though she’s got where she is with one partner and a broken condom — and informs her, “If I had a baby, my dreams would just go down the toilet.”

Although Eleanor herself is seen as damaged goods, her baby — assumed to be that much-sought-after commodity, a white, healthy infant — is much in demand. Lam’s parents, who lost a child in infancy, want to raise the child as their own; her parents would like her to give the baby to “perfectly prim, older sister, Sarah — just hand it over like a sack of potatoes.” After all, says Sarah, “We’re young and we live in a beautiful home.”

Nolan ends her novel with a surprising but very satisfying and believable twist that profoundly underscores the idea that demanding “perfection” in parents or children can be its own fatal flaw, and that sometimes passion, determination and a woman’s connection to her own child can mean more than a perfectly groomed nursery.

While many of Gaby Rodriguez’s friends and family decide her teenage pregnancy is unremarkable — “they’re used to teen moms,” says one classmate to her best friend — it is likewise assumed that she has “ruined her life.” Gaby points out, “Pregnant or not, I was still in school and getting great grades. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, with a 3.8 grade point average. With everything they knew about me, why would they be so quick to write me off as another statistic?… Didn’t they believe in me enough to know that, even if I were pregnant, I’d still find a way to go to college and achieve my dreams for me and my baby?”

Although young mothers are statistically less likely to finish high school and go to college, it may be comparable, she says, to the four-minute mile, which was once thought to be an impossible goal for a runner. But within three years after the first runner came in at four minutes, 16 others did the same. Why not see the academic plans of women like, say, President Obama’s mother — who earned a doctorate and raised two children, one of whom became president — as “the four-minute mile of teen pregnancy”?

Gaby removes her fake stomach at an assembly in front of all her classmates and a single local reporter. By the next morning, her story has spread across the wires, and she’s fielding competing offers from “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, culminating in a contract for said Lifetime movie and this very memoir, helped along by credited ghostwriter Jenna Glatzer. At the assembly, she writes, there were “about seven girls” who were actually pregnant. “I hoped they would know I wasn’t trying to embarrass them or betray their trust,” she writes, “but that I was honestly trying to give them a voice.”

Gaby Rodriguez is sharp and compassionate; no one could credibly accuse her of naiveté or the desire to exploit teen parents, with whom she is intimately familiar through her family and community. But one can’t help but wonder why outsiders saw her — a teen who could have been pregnant but ultimately was not — as such an extraordinary mouthpiece for understanding teen mothers. Might it have more than a little to do with exactly the kind of prejudice she described in her book? No one was clamoring to interview her when she was one of eight presumed teen mothers at the school. Why did it take revealing she was not a teen mother for her to gain the authority to “give a voice” to those who were?

“The Pregnancy Project,” in this light, brings to mind “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by John Griffin, a white man who impersonated a black man in order to describe the prejudice he encountered in the South. In part, the revelation comes from seeing how the exact same person can be treated so differently, depending on the circumstances. But at the time, Griffin surely benefited in part from white readers who conferred more authority on a white author. One can’t help but wonder if Rodriguez similarly gained moral authority to talk about a group of women who experience prejudice once it was established she was not a member of the group. In her book, she quotes a teen mother on a message board who writes: “When you get pregnant as a teenager, a lot of people give up on you and treat you like garbage, no matter how smart or nice or hard-working you were before. Nobody wants to ‘encourage teen pregnancy’ so they feel it’s their duty to make you suffer.” That writer remains anonymous.