Excerpt
First Month: Discovery
For us, how did it start?
In an improbable place. My husband and I were surprised ourselves at our
surroundings: in Italy, in a farmhouse outside of Todi, a Renaissance town made
of stone the color of baked bread.
We felt in those surroundings a bit like Twain's Connecticut Yankees in King
Arthur's courtexcept that in this case the court was a wedding celebration of
a friend of ours whose fiancee was the doyenne of a certain group of druggie
glitterati.
The wedding preparations that we watched from the sidelines involved a ragtag
carnival of New York's disaffected, pale young people with dark sunglasses who
populated the edges of the art world. The old sweetness of the beds of lavender
and dusty thyme, and the bending olive trees, made strange contrast with the
lounging, cattily gossiping bone-thin hangers-on to the wedding party. Everyone
seemed still sweaty from the plane trip and acrid-smelling from too many
Marlboro Lights.
Behind the small veranda where we sat, louche ex-models were making pasta in the
kitchen, dressed in black bikinis and the white high-heeled hiking boots that
w ... read full excerpt from Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood ebook