alice walker and rebecca walker

NYT discusses the evolution of a feminist daughter.

Today, however, Ms. Walker, 37, has become what she called a new Rebecca, one who has a male partner, a child and some revised theories about the ties that bind, which she explores in a new book, “Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence” (Riverhead), to be released on Thursday. A review appears in The Times Book Review today.

Its inspiration? Her son, Tenzin, 2, who is named after the Dalai Lama. (Ms. Walker’s father voted for Chaim and lost.)

Ms. Walker and her partner, a Buddhist teacher named Glen (whose last name does not appear in the book), have been living in Maui, where Tenzin plays amid the lush landscape and is pushed about in a Maclaren stroller.

“I feel like I have arrived in myself to where I want to be and who I want to be,” Ms. Walker said in a telephone interview.

Motherhood, she writes in “Baby Love,” is “the first club I’ve unequivocally belonged to.”

The book explores the usual pregnancy topics like food intake, genetic counseling and the doctor-versus-midwife debate, and reveals that Ms. Walker is now estranged from her famous mother.



nyt reviews her book here, along with Peggy Orenstein's “Waiting for Daisy"

It’s to Orenstein’s considerable credit that even when she’s naked from the waist down, she never really takes her reporter’s hat off, applying the same measured scrutiny to a junior-high-school boyfriend with a brood of 15 or the plight of women left barren and disfigured by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima as she does to her own ultimately happily resolved situation. Alas, the same can’t be said for Rebecca Walker, the author of “Baby Love,” a solipsistic open diary of gestation that shares the earthy, spontaneous form of Anne Lamott’s child-rearing classic, “Operating Instructions,” if not its transcendent quality.

Like Orenstein, Walker shunned dolls and grew up profoundly ambivalent about becoming a parent, a prospective role complicated by her bisexuality and troubled relationship with her own mother, the novelist Alice Walker, whose intermittent airing here gives the reader the uncomfortable if fascinated feeling of sitting in on an unproductive family counseling session. The younger Walker musters thoughtful passages on abortion and feminism’s obligations to men. Yet she sorely tests the reader’s patience while settling into a pregnancy of privileged contemplation, achieved with relative ease under the ministrations of a homeopath — just one in a “small army of healers” she assembles for ailments that often seem more psychic than physical (though when her son is born with meconium in his lungs and sent to the neonatal intensive care unit, it comes as a profound relief that she jettisoned the plan for a home birth with a “polytheistic fiesta theme”). A Tibetan doctor, the daughter of one of the Dalai Lama’s private physicians, offers her “little silk bags of herbs”; hovering in the background, meanwhile, are an osteopath, doula, pedicurist and masseuse. “What a bummer it is that I can’t wear scent,” Walker grouses when a spritz of perfume sets off morning sickness. She consoles herself with bad TV and indulges in repeated retail therapy. “The whole time I was shopping I was thinking that once the baby comes I will never shop again,” she writes. “The thought was like walking into an airplane propeller.”

Not to begrudge the author such luxuries, but there was no need to make the world privy to them. Orenstein’s interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy retinue comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé; Walker’s merely a paean to pampering.