Baby Love
by Joyce Maynard

Published 1981, Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York

"Four girls sit on the steps outside the Laundromat . . . "

It's a hot spring morning in New Hampshire, and Sandy, Jill, Tara and Wanda are passing the time of day. They're all sixteen except Sandy, who's eighteen and married and doing her best to be a Perfect Wife to Mark and a Perfect Mother to Mark Junior. They all have babies with them except Jill, and Jill knows she's pregnant, even though her boyfriend, Virgil, is pretending not to believe her, and she's scared to tell her mother. Tara has proudly made a little pigtail with baby Sunshine's inch and half of blond fluff -- she couldn't care less that Sunshine's father is totally out of the picture; it's baby who counts. Wanda dates a lot, but three months after Melissa's birth she still has forty pounds to lose. . . .

More or less out of high school, more or less into motherhood -- they're still children and they're having babies. And through the space of a week we're caught up in their world -- in lives sharply divided from the past and suddenly altered by baby love. Baby love as a warmth . . . as a drug . . . as unexpected strength . . . as an escape from adult emotional demands . . . as masked anger . . . as obsession . . . as the first experience of any kind of love or importance. Baby love scaring their husbands and boyfriends, making them feel rushed . . . Sandy's young husband panicked by her relentless maternalism, discovered skinny-dipping with a fifteen-year-old runaway from a private school . . . Jill's Virgil caught off balance, trying to focus on souping up his car (maybe installing a bar in the back), but now Jill is talking about this kid coming "and it's one royal drag" . . . Tara's college-boy lover vanished altogether, although Tara's mother writes his parents long letters when she's drunk . . . But the girls are with their babies and they understand about each other.

They know almost nothing about the two young women from out of town -- a little lder, childless, their backgrounds more sophisticated -- whose lives have suddenly impinged on theirs: Ann, who is escaping a disastrous love affair, indulging her depression in the farmhouse she's bought nearby and taking desperate measures to escape loneliness . . . and Carla, who has come from New York with her painter "husband" to find a haven where he can function as an artist, and who suddenly realizes that the one thing she really wants is a baby. . . .

What happens as these lives all intertwine at a moment of extreme vulnerability is wonderfully revealed. Comic, touching, filled with a wry sympathy for these girls and their boys and their babies -- and finally darkened by a slowly encroaching catastrophe -- Joyce Maynard's extraordinarily assured and appealing novel is the start of a major career.

Look for Baby Love at these booksellers/auction sites:

Amazon • eBay • ABE Books

 RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND

BACK • TOP OF PAGE