Leave - by Shayne Terry (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shayne Terry's fourth trimester is not going as planned. Instead of bonding with her new baby, she's stuck on the couch with a third-degree tear, barely able to walk. When the women in her family show up to help, they come bearing family secrets and old wounds that also need repair. Begun as notes on Terry's phone documenting a parental leave gone awry, Leave examines a healing process complicated by capitalism, intergenerational trauma, and a healthcare system with a long history of devaluing women. This powerful postpartum account treats birth as a portal, one that can connect us to a lineage of pain, joy, death, and life. And at a time when our bodily autonomy is being stripped away, Leave is an urgent exploration of one woman's experience recovering from birth in America.

Review Quotes

"Leave stitches together, fragment by fragment, a reconstruction of all the ways a woman can be in pain, and all the ways a woman can pay a price, from birthing to living to dying. . . . Through intimate vignettes, and rippling with astute intergenerational insights, Terry examines injuries that split through the core. Finally, someone asks on behalf of all women: what is normal when it comes to pain?"

-Lexi Kent-Monning, author of The Burden of Joy

"Leave asserts the power of writing, of the maternal body, and of women's voices when we say what has happened to us. It is in itself a kind of suture, a gesture toward repair. As a writer and a mother, I am so grateful this book was written."

-Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days

"With poetic concision and linguistic daring, Terry pulls back the veil on the American pregnancy industrial complex and all of its erasures, difficulties, and joys . . . The book is about healing and in reading it, I found myself revisiting my own traumatic birth story and healing myself. I've never read a book like this before. It's a must for anyone with a body, struggling to right itself in these difficult times."

-Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpocalypse

"Terry is achingly human, generous, and forthcoming about her pain, about the generational patterns of motherhood and daughterhood in her own family, and of fighting for the re-welcoming of her self. I want to give this to every woman I know."

- Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive

"Unsparing and deeply necessary, Shayne Terry's Leave is essential literature. Read it to spare yourself the ravages of silence and shame."

- Elisa Albert, author of Afterbirth and Human Blues

"An important, stunning book that explores complications of healing from a significant birth injury amid a broken health care system and intergenerational trauma, while also examining the link between birth and death." - Chicago Review of Books

"It is not hard to imagine that Leave must have been cathartic for Terry to write. What is harder to embrace is the realization that it is also cathartic to read, acknowledging what often goes unsaid and unrecognized, for any reader who has given birth, endured pain, or known someone who has (in other words: nearly everyone)." - Shelf Awareness

"While Leave wears the familiar clothes of a memoir about the postpartum period, the baby hardly appears-giving way, instead, for the mother's story, which is really a story about who in our society is allowed to experience pain." - LA Review of Books

About the Author

Shayne Terry's work has appeared in American Chordata, Catapult, Chicago Review of Books, CRAFT, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She has been selected for workshops and residencies at Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in northern Illinois, Shayne received an M.A. in Literature from University College Dublin and lives in Brooklyn.