Meaghan O’Connell with Lydia Kiesling

Meaghan O’Connell discusses her new memoir, And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I was Ready with Lydia Kiesling.

Praise for And Now We Have Everything

I began And Now We Have Everything on a Friday evening and was finished with it by Saturday afternoon–and that was with house guests to entertain and two children to keep alive! Meaghan O’Connell’s honesty, humor, vulnerability, and willingness to explore motherhood in all of its messy complexities made me feel understood in a way few books do. I never wanted it to end. A necessary, brilliant debut.”—Edan Lepucki, author of California and Woman No. 17

“Meaghan O’Connell writes with bracing clarity about the milk-soaked days of pregnancy and early parenthood, and I (truly) laughed and cried reading her account of crossing the great human divide. Maybe there are parents who don’t have to wrestle with themselves and their spouses for a free hour, who dance out of the delivery room feeling sexy and serene, but I want to throw them out a window and then stay inside and talk to Meaghan about how life really is. The biggest compliment of all: I used several hours of daylight childcare hours reading this book, just because I didn’t want to put it down.”—Emma Straub

“O’Connell’s honest, heartbreaking, and hilarious book about motherhood and identity is unlike anything I’ve ever read. And Now We Have Everything is a smart, tell-it-like-it-is essay collection from a much-needed voice.”—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Border of Paradise

About And Now We Have Everything

A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up.

When Meaghan O’Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed — a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood — didn’t exist. So she decided to write it herself.

And Now We Have Everything is O’Connell’s exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O’Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a “natural” birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity.Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and a visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.