A prodigious talent blazes onto the American literary scene with this bold, original memoir of her perilous - yet life-saving - addiction to childbearing

With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug" - the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing - cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family - nearly to the point of collapse.

Brilliantly crafted, impeccably written, intensely personal, The Motherhood Affidavits portrays a woman, a marriage, a family, caught in an impossible bind. Its heartbreaking resolution raises profound questions about whether we, as a society, are governed by morals or by laws - and whether either is an adequate measure of any one person's ability to parent and capacity for love.