Ginia Bellafante reviews Ordinary Insanity alongside Emily Oster’s The Family Firm in the New York Review of Books.
Review of ORDINARY INSANITY in The New York Times Book Review
“Menkedick is a skilled storyteller and her accounts of women from varied socioeconomic and racial backgrounds drive home how little society has to offer mothers. One told Menkedick that she’s “terrified of everything”; another wore ankle weights to keep herself from sleepwalking and hurting her baby; yet another was placed on a 72-hour hold at a psychiatric ward geared toward people detoxing from drugs because there was nowhere else to put her. None received proper help until they either found it themselves or hit dangerous levels of anxiety.”
Read more in The New York Times Book Review!
Postpartum Anxiety Is an Epidemic Among American Mothers. Why Does It So Often Go Undiagnosed? – Op-ed in Time
”As a new mother, I worried about mouse poop in the small cabin where I lived. About fracking chemicals in the water. About glyphosate in the oatmeal. About flame retardants in pajamas. About phthalates in toys. Although it constantly overwhelmed me, I thought my anxiety was normal, even necessary. After all, it was my job to protect my child. When I mentioned my fear at my six-week follow-up appointment after birth—the sole instance of medical care many new moms receive in the entire year -postpartum—the midwife shrugged and chided me that anxious mothers make anxious children.”
Read more at Time!
Starred review from Library Journal!
“Untold numbers of new mothers suffer from postpartum anxiety, a debilitating condition that is not only undiagnosed, but unrecognized by medical authorities, according to this explosive, keenly observed book by essayist Menkedick (Homing Instincts). Meticulously constructed, the book interweaves personal narrative and profiles of new mothers with historical research and medical reporting. “
Read the full review at Library Journal!
Interview with Publisher's Weekly on Ordinary Insanity
In Ordinary Insanity (Pantheon, Apr.), Sarah Menkedick calls postpartum anxiety “the last major taboo of American motherhood.” The book, which incorporates personal narrative, journalistic reportage, and medical research, aims to shine light on an issue that Menkedick writes is “having a devastating, corrosive effect on maternal well-being in the United States today.”
Read more at Publisher’s Weekly!
2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow
Thrilled to be part of this incredible group of 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellows!
Read more about the fellowship and fellows at Creative Nonfiction.
Women in Nonfiction at City of Asylum
Had a lovely evening reading with Katie Booth at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. Watch for Katie’s phenomenal, groundbreaking biography of Alexander Graham Bell in Spring 2020!
New Longreads column!
For my latest Longreads column, I talked to Leslie Jamison, Carina Chocano, and Elena Passarello about research. Find it on Longreads.
First Longreads column!
Thrilled to be writing a regular column for Longreads on the craft of nonfiction!
The first installment was published today. In it, I interview Sarah Smarsh, Lauren Markham, and Jennifer Percy on their interviewing strategies and techniques.
Read more on Longreads.
Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures Made Local Lecture
I'll be speaking at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library at 6 pm on May 25th as part of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures' Made Local lecture series. Come say hello!
Homing Instincts Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay!
Thrilled to announce that Homing Instincts has been longlisted for the PEN/Diamostein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay! I am so honored to be in such incredible company. Find the complete longlists at PEN America.
Uncivilize Podcast
It was a joy to talk motherhood, homelands, forest kindergarten, and more with Jennifer Grayson on her fascinating new podcast, Uncivilize.
Longform Podcast!
I was on the Longform podcast talking about Vela, motherhood, writing tons of horrible crap for free, and living with my parents. Wahoo!
Wild River Blues published as a Vintage Short Original!
Wild River Blues, about my little brother's and my epic road trip, in which we backpack the East Coast, eat obscene quantities of Cheez-Its, obsess about art and life and then learn not to obsess about art and life, was published today as a Vintage Short Original! This piece makes me intensely nostalgic and I hope it inspires you to hug your sibling.
“Jackson Samuel Menkedick, my little brother, has printed the Tao Te Ching on the back of a bunch of old Excel spreadsheets, looped them all together on a key ring, and placed this makeshift tome on the dash of his forest-green Honda Accord.
One weekend in June, while I am hunched over and sweating, cutting multiflora rose from the trails on my parents’ farm, he announces that he is going to spend the next year driving around the country, backpacking through the national parks, listening to thousands of hours of jazz, and reading the Tao. Instantly, I look up, freeze the clippers, and say, 'I am so coming with you.'"
Read the full Vintage Short.
Kirkus Review of Homing Instincts
"Drawing from the experiences and writings of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Louise Erdrich, Anne Enright, and other writers, Menkedick erases and redraws parts of herself as she experiences greater self-understanding, weighing values and goals against those of others in her family. She finds that her writing, previously fueled by travel, comes to serve as a stand-in for traveling itself. The natural world around her in rural Ohio provided significant opportunities for reassessment, and she embraced the entirely different journey of pregnancy and motherhood. Menkedick's writing is insightful and evocative, drawing on all the senses, and readers will be impressed by the sense of place in her writing, even while she's laboring to discern the meaning in her experience.
Menkedick's driving question is to figure out 'whether returning home signifies growing up or giving up or both—and if it’s both, what exactly we want to give up in exchange for what.' The magic of this book is that she makes so personal a question so easily accessible to readers."
Read the full review!
Publishers Weekly Review of Homing Instincts!
Thrilled about this lovely review from Publishers Weekly!
"Menkedick, a native Midwesterner, spent her 20s traveling around the globe alone, seeking out landscapes and people different from her home. Whether she was picking grapes in France or teaching English on Réunion Island, Menkedick was “using myself like a Monopoly piece, moving around the globe to acquire experience and knowledge.” At 31, she and her husband moved back home to live in a small cabin on her family’s farm in Ohio and have a baby. Menkedick’s intensely intimate collection of essays chronicles her journey from early adulthood, as a young woman who “confused travel with experience and experience with self-definition” into maturity. She beautifully depicts the physiological changes and emotional battles that took place in her mind and body as she and her husband adjusted to their new sedentary life. Menkedick is a superb storyteller and her writing is filled with remarkable scientific and literary references."
Read more at publishersweekly.com.
Announcing Milestones, my new Vela column on motherhood!
I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be running a new column at Vela called Milestones. A brief excerpt of the column description:
"No other great human experience is as systematically diminished as motherhood. Though we are all, to draw from Rich, “of woman born,” motherhood has long been shoved out of the domain of critical inquiry and artistic relevance in patriarchal societies...
Milestones is a space for women who are interested in both the inhibitions and potential of motherhood, its quotidian and epic elements, the way it restricts and frustrates, and also the way it liberates and enlightens. It examines motherhood as the human experience writ small in the belly, and huge in the scope of families, societies, and generations."
"Caught in the Middle" published on Guernica
"If my husband and I could once feign a critical distance from our adopted cultures, maintaining the surrealistic gaze of travelers, now we must acknowledge that through the creation of our family we possess the blood, history, and responsibility of an America that spans borders. As we raise a daughter who carries in her veins both the tremendous, destructive dominion of the white United States and the largely hidden world of exploited brown labor, we must find a way to engage with each and negotiate their conflicted overlap. It is a challenge that has proved more painful and essential than I ever would have imagined when we first danced with our turkey five years ago, and slaughtered it the next day."
On a police incident and my changing awareness of race in the U.S.
Honorable mention from The Cincinnati Review
My essay "Open" received an Honorable Mention in The Cincinnati Review's annual contest. Judges called it a "beautiful meditation on the altered state of motherhood." Lovely to receive this little shoutout from my hometown!
"Living on the Hyphen" selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2015!
Great to see that my essay "Living on the Hyphen," published in the fall 2014 issue of Oxford American, has been selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2015, edited by Ariel Levy. This news was made even more awesome by the fact that three other Vela writers–Eva Holland, Amanda Giracca, and Amy Butcher–are in the notables as well. Hurrah for women essaysists!