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| credit: Lisa Johnson Photography |
Lisa Catherine Harper began writing
A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood, winner of the 2010
River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, when she was pregnant with her first child, her daughter Ella. Chronicling from conception to her baby's first word, she writes "how motherhood transforms the female body, hijacks a woman’s mind, and splits her life in two," according to the publisher,
University of Nebraska Press.
That split refers to life before child(ren), and after. But this book isn't only a memoir. While the story is rooted in her own experiences, it is also deeply researched.
In a "
Redwood City Mother" interview in the Belmont
Patch, Harper said about Double Life: