Ghostbelly: A Memoir

When Heineman (Before Porn Was Legal), a professor at the University of Iowa, became pregnant at age 45, she and her partner Glenn opted for a home birth with a certified nurse-midwife, expecting an uneventful delivery of her second child. In the first pages of this riveting memoir, however, something goes terribly wrong during the labor process, and readers are carried along on a frightening wave of events leading to a stillborn birth. Thereupon, Heineman analyses every decision and turn she took from conception to gestation to delivery and beyond. In so doing, she not only probes her own grief, but gives life to the very child she has lost. Courage was required to write this raw story, and it also takes some to follow along with Heineman as she brings her embalmed baby home from the funeral parlor and reads to him. She also examines the practices of midwives and hospital physicians while scouring her memory for any mistake she (or her caregivers) may have made. As Heineman admits, “there is nothing happy about a dead baby. Not beginning, not middle, not end.” Her story reveals the depths of emotional pain associated with stillbirth and reveals that parental love has no boundaries. (Mar.)