The year my body revolted, I read all 1,296 pages of War and Peace. I did very little else. My body had become stuck in a perpetual rinse cycle, wringing itself out day and night. Becalmed on the sofa, too nauseated to mindlessly scroll, I found an unlikely emergency exit in the bloody Battle of Borodino. In between puking jags, I would prop the book open on my chest, squint at the tiny text, and drift into a Tolstoy-induced torpor. It occurred to me that clouds of saltpetre and the booming of cannon weren’t ideal conditions for a growing baby, but I had to go somewhere.
At 6am my husband left for work and I began another gruelling day on the front; purging viscous pond slime from my empty stomach and keeping up with the Cossacks on their flanking march. In the throes of extreme pregnancy sickness, I found strange comfort in the privations of 19th-century military life; in soaked bandages and musket fire and impromptu field hospital amputations. And even, or especially, in the seeming endlessness of the book itself. For the months that I starved, I lugged my starving Russian comrades with me, from the upholstery-chemical stink of the sofa to the sweet bleach-stink of the bathroom to the seamy oily-skin stink of the bed. Perhaps it was a derangement of dehydration and hormones, but I felt real solidarity with my gangrenous friends on the front – far more than with anyone in a “felt cute” sundress on the What to Expect When You’re Expecting app.
