This Book Will Change Your Life - Baby & Other Stories by Paula Bomer.

We suppose other authors write about just how much the promise of marriage and parenting can be so profoundly disappointing when you learn that the passion will fade, children can be monsters, and we have invested too much of our identity in the idea that one or both of these states of being will make us happy, or at the least, satisfied with our lives. We also suppose that there are other authors who write as devastatingly about substance abuse and adultery as escape and salve. Some who seek to capture the female experience of childbirth, sexuality, and aging, though there are few who do so in such stark detail and emotion, crafting crushing, at times, suffocating stories full of longing and desperation. What we don't suppose, however, is that even though we know our experience of Baby was impacted by reading a book wrapped in so much pain and dread, we've also never had the experience of reading a book as we did with Baby that made us kind of hate other writers for not writing books with the kind of detailed and realistic precision that Bomer does.