Birth Mother

A Memoir

De: Denise Emanuel Clemen

Narrado por: Noelle Kayser

Pregnant from her first sexual encounter, a teenager living in a town of 3,000 Catholics keeps her secret from everyone until six weeks before the baby's due date. Hustled out of town and hidden in the Iowa countryside within hours of finally confiding in her mother, she concocts a scheme that will allow her to raise her child, but can she win over any of the people who might help her? As her pregnancy and its looming consequences unfold, she realizes that her life of lies and secrets has only just begun.

Denise Emanuel Clemen's fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Georgetown Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, the Rattling Wall, Fiction Fix, Knee-Jerk, and the Delmarva Review.

Clemen has worked as an art model, sold her own blood plasma, and worked on an assembly line in a factory where she became an expert at assembling toy manure spreaders. She's received fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Ragdale Foundation and was an Auvillar fellow at Moulin à Nef in France in 2009. Clemen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska and regularly walks the beaches of Ventura County, California, hunting for treasures to take home to her 89-year-old mother. Her household is home to three generations and an elderly cat.

This is a short audiobook published by Shebooks - high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women.

©2014 Denise Emanuel Clemen (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Memories

So much of this book is my story too. It is written so well and I am so grateful that the author could put into words things I felt almost 45 years ago!!!

weird ending to the book

Great story but the ending was so abrupt, it feels like I did not finish the book, it just stopped and that was that. No closure to the storyline.

Facts

Love that the narrator has a young voice giving us the prospective a young girl. Reality that many young girls went through this experience.

Left too much hanging

What an abrupt end. As someone who has worked with birth mothers, I’d hoped for more of the story

too short

I liked this story! but I want to know what else happens! like what happens?

Sober Memoir, But Good

I did enjoy this book. The narration is very good. I'm sure many have been in the same situation over the years. What a decision to be faced with. This is written very well and is a quick, but thought provoking memoir.

Narrator annoying

The story was okay, but the narrator’s mispronunciation (brockade, ditn’t, coutn’t) and strange perky articulation were almost too much to take.

Skipped at chapter 1 & then totally died at chapter 11

This Audio began skipping in the first chapter. I was just about to delete the book but chapter 2 to 11 were fine. The story is very good and I liked the reader performing it but then….I was enjoying this memoir then at chapter 11 it stopped working and an orange screen came on saying “Sorry there was a problem! If this continues happening please contact Audible” I tried several times, shut my phone down and restarted it again, nothing. Left it for a few hours and tried again! Nothing! All the other downloaded audio books in my library worked fine. So I am giving it an overall 1 star!