Aileen Weintraub - Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir

Aileen Weintraub has written a profoundly honest memoir that is sometimes painful but always loving, as she walks us through her journey from Brooklyn childhood to rural living. Heartfelt and often humorous Jewish culture meets rural farming culture, all coming together in the glorious Hudson Valley. It took us back to the best moment of our livesthe beginning of making a family.

Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody

This memoir of an almost inconceivably difficult pregnancy (pun intended) involves multiple dichotomies: urban/rural, male/female, Jew/non-Jew, life/death. Weintraub handles these oppositions with the deft, stunning, and mesmerizing touch of a writer who knows when to weep and when to laugh, when to hold on and when to let go. Whatever the opposite is of elegy, this is it.

Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

A gripping blend of humor and poignancy.... Weintraubs keen eye for detail and breathless storytelling make this sharply observed memoir impossible to put down.

Sari Botton, author of And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen X Weirdo

Knocked Down is a funny and poignant story of a pregnant urban girl suddenly uprooted and forced to rediscover herself in a possibly haunted old ramshackle farmhousea brave and vibrant story of self-discovery and grace.

Aspen Matis, #1 Amazon best-selling author of Your Blue Is Not My Blue and Girl in the Woods

Knocked Down engaged me from the opening lines. This is a wonderfully nuanced story, at turns laugh-out-loud hilarious and heartbreaking, rooted in love, romance, community, and resilience. I loved this book.

Elissa Altman, author of Motherland

Knocked Down poignantly and often hilariously reminds us that no one is exempt from lifes unexpected curveballs. Aileen Weintraub weaves her wry wisdom into this chronicle of how the choices we make can collide with circumstances beyond our control. This fast-paced memoir of a woman who is forced to slow down is proof positive that precarious situations can be overcome with family, faith, and especially love.

Nava Atlas, author of Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife and creator of LiteraryLadiesGuide.com

With characteristic warmth, Aileen Weintraub invites readers into the complexity of bodies and families, dreams and disappointments, pain and love. Knocked Down is moving, candid, and deeply funny.

Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession

I was really nervous about this book, but every family has its secrets. So what? Doesnt every mother pack a suitcase full of brisket to bring to her children? This book is about life and relationships and what happens when things dont go as planned. I guess all those years I dropped Aileen off at the library so I could get an hour to myself once in a while really paid off. This is a good story. You should read it. But Im still leaving the country for a few weeks when it comes out.

Mrs. Weintraub, Aileens mom

American Lives

Series editor: Tobias Wolff

Aileen Weintraub

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2022 by Aileen Weintraub

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover images Shutterstock: tiara/wangstudio; Empire State Building/ivector. Tractor iStock/ivan_baranov.

Author photo Greg Payan.

All rights reserved

The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weintraub, Aileen, 1973 author.

Title: Knocked down: a high-risk memoir / Aileen Weintraub.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2022] | Series: American lives

Identifiers: LCCN 2021036588

ISBN 9781496230201 (paperback)

ISBN 9781496231895 (epub)

ISBN 9781496231901 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Weintraub, Aileen, 1973 | Pregnant womenBiography. | Bed rest. | Farm life. | BISAC : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women

Classification: LCC HQ 759 . W 429 2022 | DDC 306.874/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036588

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To my father

This is a true story, even the parts where you will undoubtedly shake your head and say, No way, did that really happen? Some names and identifying features have been changed to mildly protect the identity of certain individuals. Minor tweaks to the timeline of events were made for literary cohesion.

The house was haunted.

I had my suspicions when I moved in. In the middle of the night, the lights flickered, the phone chimed when nobody called, and most disturbing, I witnessed tears sliding down the rough, misshapen stone fireplace. Maybe it was because my father-in-laws ashes were kept in a German beer stein on the mantel. Or because one day my husbands grandmother put her head down on the dining room table as though she were about to take a nap and died instead.

The child inside my belly would be the fourth generation to live here. Unfortunately, it had also been four generations since anyone had slapped a coat of paint on the walls or updated the furniture. But I loved the place, an old dairy farm my husband, Chris, had inherited, and we planned to spend the rest of our lives fixing it up and making it our own.

I surveyed the room, the dusty old Victrola that played by itself, the pastel vertical blinds that rattled when there was no breeze. I was going to start crying just like my fireplace if I had to look at all this for one more day. Perhaps a little sprucing up would act as a peace offering to the spirits for invading their space. I needed to stay occupied, otherwise I would succumb to a loop of anxiety. I was twenty weeks pregnant and had been on bed rest for fourteen days, getting up only to pee and to take a quick shower. That meant I had twenty weeks to go in my sentence of near-solitary confinement... if I was lucky enough to make it to my due date. My only crime: an ailing cervix.

Two weeks earlier I had been spread-eagle on the examination table in a bright yellow room looking up at a poster of an imitation Georgia OKeeffe flower taped to the ceiling while my doctor put her hands in places that generally required a lot more foreplay and at least a little bit of booze. Fashionably decked out in one of those fabulous pink paper robes, which had ripped as I slipped it on, I looked like I was sporting some cheap off-the-shoulder evening wear. It was the first time my husband had seen me in stirrups. So much for maintaining that air of mystery, but his eyes twinkled when he looked at me, and I was reassured.

I propped myself up on my elbows to get a better look at the doctor, who was mumbling something between my legs, but all I could see were the dark roots on her bleached-blond head. I lay back down and gave Chris a smile and a wink. He was doing well, sitting off to my right in the unofficial husbands chair. We had planned to go to that little Mexican place down on the waterfront for dinner, and I began thinking about the menu options.