Pregnant With One Child and 295,233 Words

How does pregnancy alter the reading and writing mind? I volunteer my own for consideration. While pregnant with my daughter I wrote a 295,233-word Google doc and read very little.

What existed of my attention span was beamed toward texts about gestation. In the 1882 book “Enlightened Woman,” a physician called M. Elna Haverfield suggested the following clever cure for nausea: Drink one cup of coffee first thing in the morning. If that doesn’t work, insert a morphine suppository. A 19th-century manual by the surgeon Pye Henry Chavasse revealed that what we call a “popped” bellybutton was once referred to as a “pouting” bellybutton.And from Nadia Maria Filippini’s “Pregnancy, Delivery, Childbirth” I discovered that the word “placenta” comes from the Latin, without modification, where it means flatbread — suggesting that someone in the distant past had weird ideas about discs of unleavened wheat.

At night I cruised eBay for old pregnancy pamphlets. These were housed under the “Collectibles” tab and sold at bargain-bin prices, being medically obsolete but not, apparently, worthless. Some were published by the U.S. government. Some issued from powdered-milk companies or women’s associations of eccentric ideological bent. They came in pink, blue, yellow, peach. Stork imagery was abundant. Sex was euphemized. Meatloaf recipes were inescapable.

Though the details charmed me, it was the aggregate effect I was after: Each pamphlet existed in irresolvable conflict with one, or often all, of the others. A pamphlet from 1941 encouraged staying active while a booklet from 1943 advised the expectant to rest. One said to avoid soda fountains; another to drink plenty of Coca-Cola. Do not smoke, said pamphlet A; pamphlet B thought it fine to smoke 10 cigarettes per day. Whether it was better to eschew tightfitting garments or wear a girdle depended on which set of stapled pages sat at the top of my bedside pile. The clashing advice formed a din of white noise, leaving me free (I mirthfully concluded) to follow no advice at all. On nights of anxious insomnia I could select a sheaf at random and paddle myself to sleep on its sea of antique knowledge.

The most potent of the reading materials was neither obsolete nor directly concerned with pregnancy, though its “inciting incident” involved childbirth. “The Midnight Disease,”a book published in 2005 by the neurologist Alice Flaherty, combines science and memoir to examine a medical condition known as hypergraphia.

Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write excessively and without obvious purpose or profit. Hypergraphics tend to exhibit flamboyant penmanship and fill every inch of space on a page. They favor colored inks and CAPITAL LETTERS. They write in response to internal rather than external pressures — so, not to achieve tenure or impress girls. And their writing must be coherent. That is, it must rise above sheer orthographic compulsion, must express more than a third grader’s cursive worksheet.