Review: Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir by Aileen Weintraub
Reviewed by Erin Fogarty Owen
Aileen Weintraub’s debut memoir, Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir, is an intimate and introspective story about her complicated pregnancy and the reverberating effects on her marriage, religious beliefs, and identity as a mother. Despite the uncertain future Weintraub and her unborn child face, this mostly chronological memoir is chock-full of witty observations and humorous reflections. At its core, though, is Weintraub’s sincere desire to live a full, meaningful life and find a way to ensure her new family is still intact at the end of her journey.
Early in her memoir, five years before the high-risk pregnancy that throws her world into a tailspin, Weintraub travels to Alaska after quitting a job at a children’s publishing company in Manhattan. Lost and uncertain about her next big life choice, she climbs a glacier and peers inside:
“I could see the hard, unforgiving ice and the blue water rushing beneath. I could see both the permanent and the temporary, the sharp edges, the sacredness of it all. The very second I was upright I knew that I would never work in an office again. I had looked into the depths of eternity, and there were no cubicles down there.”
Recognizing the parallels between what she’s observed in nature and her own life, Weintraub leaves Alaska, inspired to leave her comfort zone in the city so she can chase the “sense of reverence” she felt on the glacier. With this scene, Weintraub establishes a pattern that follows throughout the book: she matches any predicament in her life with some form of active discovery—physical, spiritual, and mental—to find wisdom to apply to her current reality.
She succeeds at her goal of shaking things up and joins AmeriCorps and later moves to a sleepy Hudson Valley town surrounded by farmland two hours north of New York City. This is where she meets and settles down with a hedge-fund-turned-power-equipment-business owner in a possibly haunted farmhouse in Accord, New York, and becomes pregnant within months of the marriage. The high-risk nature of her pregnancy, “monster fibroids” competing with her growing baby placing pressure against her cervix, fosters her anxious contemplation about the permanency of her path to motherhood. Her current struggle is clearly defined, and she searches for answers.
She writes, “I began looking up statistics about miscarriages and high-risk pregnancies. I knew this wasn’t healthy, that I’d only become more anxious, but I was searching for something tangible among the numbers and percentages, knowing that if I couldn’t solve the riddle of the past, perhaps I could see the future.”
The primary focus of Weintraub’s explorative thoughts about “the riddle of the past” center on her father, Richard, who dies before Aileen is married, and who the book is dedicated to. Growing up, she adored her father, even though he’s a “guy who hated just about everyone he met.” They had a special connection in spite of or maybe because of the push-pull aspect to their relationship. He was her best friend, even though they frequently quarreled. He also teaches her how to fight. After discovering Aileen keeps missing her orthodontist appointments because a high school bully lives near the doctor’s office, he says:
“If she lays a finger on you, don’t run. Stay and fight. Right hook to the jaw, jab with your left. Upper cut under her chin. All else fails, grab her by her hair and go for the eyes.”
Other pressures continue to build for Weintraub in addition to the threat of premature labor: unpaid bills, her husband’s struggling business, and a fraying marriage. Meanwhile, an interesting—and sometimes irritating to Aileen—array of characters come in and out of the farmhouse where she is confined to bed to hold off early labor.
She writes, “The world we were trying to create together was crashing and burning, and all I could do was watch it smolder. It felt like there was a hex upon us. Every time I tried to take a deep, cleansing inhalation, the baby would lodge a limb in my rib cage.”
Fortunately, Weintraub’s interconnected worlds of past, present, and future provide her with no small amount of guidance. To alleviate pressure from her persistent worries, she once again finds solace in a lesson from her father:
“Hadn’t my father taught me to get back up when life pushed me down? These lessons had not come easy—for me or for him.” Notably, Weintraub’s poetic talents are frequently displayed during scenes of her father. Ultimately, his advice proves prophetic: to protect the meaningful life she desires, she’ll have to access the fighter within.
Storytelling is the through line of Erin Fogarty Owen’s professional career. She spent time working at the United States Senate as a press aide, at NBC News as a producer, and at the University of Nebraska as a director of communications. Erin received her MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in August 2020. She has been published in the Omaha World-Herald, NBC News, Axios, and Boston Accent Lit and is a flash nonfiction editor for The Good Life Review.