Love Works Like This: Travels Through a Pregnant Year

'Is even the most clenched heart capable of it?' Lauren Slater asks in this original and eloquent book about love. Slater, career-orientated and wilfully autonomous, charts her own personal journey and decision-making process in deciding to have a child. She starts with a list of the pros and cons. The cons list is long and includes 'less time for friends', 'less time for work', 'less money' and 'Prozac (I'm on it)'. The pros had only one entry: 'Learn a new kind of love.' But what will that love look like? Slater deals with many issues that are universal yet controversial: how to reconcile the needs of the self with the demands of others, how to go from being a couple to being a threesome, and how to adjust to losing control of one's carefully developed life, a life mapped out and run according to a plan. Slater's own complex biological and psychological history lies at the core of this story. One of the first people to take Prozac, she chronicles the conflicting advice regarding its use during pregnancy and her eventual decision to stop taking it for the first trimester. "Love Works Like This" is more than the story of one woman's pregnancy. It is a richly written book about falling in love, about learning to be selfless, and about the courage required to change one kind of happy life into another very different one.