Preview

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Expecting

By: Chitra Ramaswamy
Narrated by: Chitra Ramaswamy
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $18.91

Buy for $18.91

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

From the author of Homelands, a Guardian memoir of the year 2022

"A cartoon fried egg. An eye. The tiniest of black holes. It needed a professional eye to be seen, but once pointed out it was undeniable. My own little Big Bang. The beginning of it all."

When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant for the first time, she longed to listen to something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of the overwhelming, thrilling, and often misrepresented experience she was embarking on. She couldn’t find one.

So, she wrote Expecting.

Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of gestation and birth, Ramaswamy takes the listener on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one's life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective that are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.

Ramaswamy bears witness to the experience of pregnancy in an intimate yet expansive book of lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.

©2016 Chitra Ramaswamy (P)2024 Saraband
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

'Writing of great insight, humour and emotional intelligence.' The Times

“The point of literature is that we can understand what we can never experience … I found this poetic and polemical book moving and fascinating.” Scotsman

“Nourished by a rich seam of artistic and literary consciousness … This experience of one woman’s pregnancy … becomes the story of everyone.” Kirsty Gunn, Guardian

What listeners say about Expecting

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.