THE BIG RUMPUS

From the exuberant publisher, writer, and creator of the quarterly ’zine The East Village Inky, a breezy memoir of motherhood that for all its hip attitude also affectingly recalls traditional fears, joys, and a sense of the miraculous.

Halliday begins with a prologue in which she explains how she came to create the ’zine and in so doing saved her mind. She had always wanted to write, but not until daughter India (Inky) was one year old did she realize that she had the subject matter right at hand, as well as a welcome alternative to sitting at home “staring at the congealed blobs of baby food I was too fried to sponge off the walls.” The ’zine gave her an excuse to wander around New York with Inky on her back, looking for material. Halliday now has another child, son Milo, and continues to publish The East Village Inky, whose success she attributes to the fact that in its pages “not a lot happens.” Her memoir chronicles a life that changed forever after she gave birth and learned that the baby “would like to remind you that she is now the primary reason you were put on earth.” Halliday describes the usual rites of motherhood: her children’s births (one easy, one complicated by a postnatal infection), breastfeeding (“I don’t mind if people see. . . . It’s a life-affirming, nonviolent, free-to the-public moment that makes the world a slightly better place”), and celebrating the holidays, during which her good resolutions about homemade decorations began to waver when she realized how much time it took to craft valentines or stain Easter eggs, when five minutes in the nearby Rite-Aid would provide everything she needed. She also movingly acknowledges her infatuation with her chubby baby (“I loved you beyond reason. I am drunk on your pulchritude”) as well as her fears of death and loss.

Motherhood recalled with engaging brio and considerable wisdom.