About the Book

Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.

Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak. 

With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision. 

While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species.

PRAISE FOR NINE MOONS

“A Peruvian journalist’s vibrant musings on pregnancy and childbirth. In this whip-smart follow-up to Sexographies (2018), the author details her nine months of pregnancy as anything but pastel. Wiener interweaves facts on embryonic development and other scientific elements with visceral experience and accounts of her rabbit-hole internet searches to reveal the anxiety of her first full-term pregnancy…. Such dark, fertile forays signal Wiener's original take on the simultaneously common and unique experience of pregnancy…. The author's ruminations are consistently provocative, digging into areas many are not willing to go…. Wiener's reflections on her relationship with her mother, which included microaggressions and tense exchanges, are also illuminating…. Refreshingly literary and offbeat—a mother-to-be book for firebrands.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“With certain writers it doesn’t matter what the book is about, because the brain that created it is so euphoric, so wicked, so irascibly specific, that you want to clear out a corner of your own headspace and beckon the author inside as a permanent tenant. It is for this reason that I, a person who has never been pregnant and has little interest in reproduction, can recommend a book about a pregnant lady who watches trash TV and dreams that she’s going to give birth to a monkey…. [Gabriela Wiener’s] mind is a beautiful and unique organ…. It’s the sort of book you will read and pass on to your friends with a note that says TRUST ME taped to the cover. You needn’t possess a baby to enjoy it. Having once been a fetus is enough.”

—Molly Young, New York Magazine

“If Angela Garbes mind melded with Samantha Irby and Jami Attenberg, and wrote specifically about sex, and oh, there's a baby somewhere in there. I LOVE THIS BOOK. I want everyone to read it. I want to learn Spanish so I can read everything the Peruvian author Gabriela Wiener has to say.”

—Anne Ishii, Letters from Annie

“Provocative, offbeat, and always insightful, Gabriela Wiener’s follow-up to Sexographies does not disappoint. The book charts Wiener’s thoughts on pregnancy and motherhood during her own pregnancy with her signature daring and candidness. The second of her books to be translated into English, Nine Moons reads like the delightfully uncomfortable sex ed class you didn’t know you wanted.”

—Nika, Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY)

“From the Peruvian author of Sexographies comes another brave and candid exploration, this time of pregnancy and motherhood. Taking no prisoners, Wiener guides readers through her nine months of pregnancy and all the misinformation, stereotypes, questions, misgivings, fears and confusion she confronts along the way.”

—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine