Review: My Body is a Big Fat Temple by Alena Dillon

Reviewed by Anna Sims

“Even the most typical accounts of pregnancy and motherhood are extraordinary, and extraordinarily harrowing (spoiler alert),” Alena Dillon writes in the preface to her memoir in essays, My Body Is a Big Fat Temple. “The general public might not realize this because conversations about pregnancy are often airbrushed. We crop out the ugly parts, smudge over the distasteful, and embrace the romantic. In the rare instances when we speak honestly, it is in hushed tones so that no one hears the secret: it kinda sucks.”

And from this realization, the premise of Dillon’s memoir was born: to shout the details of pregnancy that are too often whispered, to chronicle her own journey through pregnancy and early motherhood for “other women out there who are hungry for information, honesty, and community the way yogurt commercials depict us as being hungry for 100-calorie dessert substitutes.”

With that, let me say: I am a thirty-two-year-old woman who is not a mother. I’ve never been pregnant, either. (I do, however, hate dessert substitutes almost as much as I hate the stupid advertisements that appear so convinced I love them.) I suspect that would all be clear by the end of this, but still, it feels like something I should own right away.

I also want to be careful with how I frame this next point because I don’t believe that having a baby is the experience that makes a person a woman. Or that someone needs to be able to have a baby to be considered a woman at all. Or that mothers and women should be so entangled in the public mind as they unavoidably are. And yet, while reading Dillon’s book, it was impossible to miss the overlap between the problems of the two. Which is to say: everything that’s bad about being a woman also seems true about having a baby.

Dillon’s tight, just-under-two-hundred-page memoir is split into seven sections: one covering her life just before pregnancy; one for each trimester; one for the less-discussed fourth trimester that includes labor and the first few weeks after her son’s birth, cheekily titled, “The Rest of the First Year (well, not so much rest)”; and a final section where Dillon takes stock of her first years of motherhood.

Dillon writes open letters throughout all sections—to her body, to women who fear childbirth (Hi, Alena, I’m Anna. Nice to meet you!), and to the “beautiful stranger” at Target who told the thirty-five-weeks pregnant Dillon, “Wow, you look great.” (Dillon concludes this letter, “God bless you and all of your descendants.”). But the bulk of the memoir covers her actual pregnancy, each essay subtitled with how many weeks pregnant she was during its events.

Dillon wrote the book in real time (minus the actual labor, of course) to capture her discoveries and feelings at their most raw. And those discoveries and feelings, like Dillon’s essays, range from hilarious to terrifying to informative to downright enraging—and sometimes, they’re many of those things at once. Like when at Ten Weeks (“First Look”) Dillon learns that she’s one of many women who was born with nipples angled in a way that can make it really hard to breastfeed, regardless of how many gizmos you buy to assist. (“Wait, wait, wait a second. These aren’t normal nipples?. . . How have I reached my thirties without ever knowing my boobs are weird?” Dillon laments, prompting me to add “nipples” to the long list of things that can be wrong with a woman’s body). Like when at Thirty-Seven Weeks (“My Body Is a Big Fat Temple”), Dillon tells her doctor she’s experiencing awful vertigo. In response, Dillon writes, “there’s no attempt to pin down the source of my lightheadedness. Only in pregnancy, the grand mystery bag of ailments, where anything goes, do MDs hear such a range of conditions that they shrug at every infirmity.” Dillon’s doctor tells her to “avoid places where passing out might be dangerous.” (Which sort of seems to me like that would be everywhere? So is the advice to stick Dillon in a padded cell? That women with problems we can’t explain should just go somewhere to hide?)

And then there’s the baby blues. Dillon writes that 70 to 80 percent of new moms experience the baby blues, a two-week bout of “fluctuating melancholy” often paired with “mood swings, anxiety, fuzzy thinking, fatigue, irritability, and fear that you’re not a good mother,” that occurs post-labor and pre-postpartum depression, and even though you go to approximately six million doctors’ appointments before having a baby, usually no one bothers to tell you about it.

Dillon is one of those 70 to 80 percent of women. And like the vertigo, the doctors have no cure for her affliction. “There’s nothing women can do but soldier through it,” Dillon writes in “Baby Blues.” Later in the essay, she continues: “Postpartum depression is often depicted as a woman steering her car into a lake—a concrete and concretely threatening condition. But it’s a spectrum, and there’s an entire country of mothers who land closer to the baby blues, ambiguously despondent, set apart from their babies, scared, ashamed, damp with tears. Their situations aren’t widely discussed because they don’t align with our perception of the hallowed mother, glowing with gratitude … Or maybe we’ve just been convinced that the world doesn’t care. The trials of new moms are icky, too irrelevant to public discourse—too female.”

Dillon’s writing is almost always at its best when she deliberately leans in to the parallels between the woes of womanhood and having a baby, critiquing the systematic issues at play.

After reading about Dillon’s weeks of debilitating morning . . . and afternoon . . . and evening . . . sickness, at Nineteen Weeks (“A Womb of One’s Own”) Dillon books a massage, only to be told on arrival that the massage therapist won’t see her because it could cause a miscarriage. When Dillon protests, saying she’s done her own research and that never came up, the massage therapist responds by walking Dillon “to the front of the business as if escorting a troublemaker to the principal’s office.”

Of course, as Dillon herself owns, “A white lady deprived of a massage doesn’t exactly spike on the radar of social justice issues.” But then, she totally goes there: because it’s not about the massage. It’s about the way the world works. It’s about how it’s just so par for the course for not just massage therapists, but for doctors; for politicians; for any Joe, Dick, or Harry; or Joan, Diane, or Harriet to believe that they have the right to decide what another woman does with her body.

Even when Dillon is less deliberate about the similarities of pregnancy and womanhood, they’re still pretty impossible to miss. Like how Dillon feels the need throughout her pregnancy to perform the role of excited mother or comfortable human not about to pee her pants or keel over in nausea. (I mean, isn’t all of womanhood a bit of a performance?) Or when Dillon notes that women can be just as unkind as men in their judgements of pregnant women, writing, “Does she think she’s the first pregnant woman in history? Other women suck it up.” (The patriarchy would be nothing without the women who help uphold it.) Or the fact that, as Dillon writes, pregnant women of color have a mortality rate three times higher than that of white women(!), 60 percent of which might have been preventable(!!!) if we just listened and provided better medical access to those women. (Because pregnancy, like womanhood—like most things—is easier if you are white.)

Lest I’ve left you thinking Dillon’s book is just one gigantic web of ladyhood metaphors, let me make clear: it’s not. I mean, it could be. It really, really could be. Like, I’ve got four more pages of notes about how it could be. But with Dillon’s openness and wit, her book doesn’t read that way. It reads as the story of a person with ups and downs, real pains and deep, deep pleasures that are impactful not because they are so earth-shatteringly unique, but because they are familiar, often rooted in the same anxieties, pressures, and pains that many of us face. One of the standout essays of the memoir, “Bodies in Motion,” focuses not just on pregnancy but on the ways time and age change her father, change her dog, change all of us.

But if you could indulge me for one last female-centric take: Throughout the book, Dillon muses on what will become of her identity as a woman—as a human—once she’s mother, a subject that very much interests me, a nonmother who’s scared but interested in becoming a mother, and doesn’t want to lose herself in the process. (This issue, I know, may also concern men. Still, it feels fair to say that women become mothers first to the eyes of society more so than men become fathers first in parenthood).

In “What to Expect When You’re Expected to Expect,” Dillon cuts straight to this chase: “I’m afraid to have children. I’m afraid to birth a butternut squash and invite it to chew on my nipples; to slip into sleepless insanity; to unknowingly apply poop mousse to my hair. . . . I fear trading in my current identity for ‘mother.’”

I immediately highlighted this passage while reading, and I drew a few stars next to it for good measure. Then I kept waiting for her to assure me that wouldn’t happen.

Instead, she writes, “My identity is blurring, melding to the fetus’s, or reassigning to it completely. . . . I’ve entered a new reality where I don’t bear the consequences of my actions alone. So I have a choice: I can insist on independence, behave as I see fit, or I can be a good mother” (“First Look,” Ten Weeks).

And I thought, How unfair.

Instead, she writes, “I may find donning two new identities conjointly—Mother and Author—to be as seamless as layering necklaces or as bulky as shoving legs into two pairs of pants, or I may be so bewildered I’ll forget to wear pants at all. . . . I may lose sense of who I am inside so much new skin, or I may retreat, burrow to my core, and discover who I was and what I wanted all along” (“A Womb of One’s Own,” Nineteen Weeks).

And I thought, Well, which is it? Will you lose or will you discover?

Instead, after her son, Rowen, is born, she writes, “I don’t yet know how to operate as a mother inside my old life, with my former community and connections, nor have I found footing in this new one” (“The Nest”).

And I thought, You still don’t know? When do we get to know?

Instead, she writes, “I’ll fawn over Rowen’s childhood . . . I’ll remember his garbled “Are you, Mimi?” [his word for ‘mama’] to inquire as to my whereabouts, while also asking the question I’d been wondering all along–Are you Mimi –the answer to which became, over those complicated first years, an emphatic, Yes, Baby. I am” (“A Reflection on the First Two Years”).

And I smiled because this anecdote is adorable and beautiful. But still, I wondered: Do you ever feel the old worries? Does the version of yourself that remains, that exists, feel like enough?

Of course, I’m being unfair. No one can tell us what our exact experience with pregnancy, with motherhood, with personhood, will be. That is the founding principle of Dillon’s memoir: there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this stuff. Even when the problems are universal, like so many are, those problems don’t affect everyone equally.

All any of us can do—and what Dillon does so well—is share the stories we have. And to share them honestly without filter, on Instagram or otherwise.   

So no, Dillon doesn’t always answer the Big Questions she asks about identities and women and motherhood and sexism. (Unless you’re wondering if she thinks you should have a doula—then yes! And if you should get a husband stitch? Absolutely not.) That said, reading this book will leave my fellow childless people and mothers alike feeling more seen, more informed, and more compassionate toward ourselves. And in a world that can be unfair in so many ways, this feels like a very fair tradeoff. 

Anna Sims is a writer, editor, and professor with work in The Millions, Shondaland, and Boston Magazine, among others. She's working on an essay collection that's part humor, part cultural criticism about life's broken things, from journalism to feminism to hope itself. You can reach her on Twitter @annalise515