What a midwife does, how she learned to do it, and why are topics most women probably find intriguing. I just finished reading a review copy of Beacon Press’ The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by
Patricia Harman. It’s her first book, and readers will be immediately drawn in by her warm, personal voice.
I was fascinated to see that this non-fiction memoir was every bit as entertaining and poignant as the novel I loved a few years ago called THE MIDWIFE. Harman’s book is, of course, set in fairly contemporary time – her career began in the American hippy communes of the 1960s and 1970s.
As a baby boomer, I identified with that era and with her journey to now – when she is past middle age, still working hard to keep the financial end of her business on track, and torn between desires to retire and get out of the stress of owning a business and her love of serving her women patients. If you pick up this book, you’ll keep reading, because it’s much like listening to a friend tell her story over a cup of coffee.
Occasionally, Harman’s writing style gets in her own way. She flips, often in a single paragraph, from present to past tense and back. Sometimes it happens within a single sentence, and though an artful device if used carefully, it can, and does become confusing enough to pull the reader out of the story and into critique mode. Still, if you can pass by that flaw, you probably zip through the book in a few days and be glad you read it.
There are many, many memoirs from midwives. The subject lends itself to story telling. What can be more dramatic that a pregnancy – even a normal one? And if you add risk, bad partners, daughters in trouble, and women who can’t quite make the step from child to mother, the drama grows. This book has all those elements and is unique in its own ways.
Harman and her husband practiced together for many years, and she tells her story honestly. The 
reader sees into the reality of being a medical provider – insurance issues, business management getting in the way of patient care, and personalities interacting on the job. But through it all are the stories of women. A cancer patient – one you don’t quite expect. A teen who keeps trusting her drug-addicted boyfriend until her life unravels in tragedy. A woman who wants help with a problem that many practitioners would refuse to get involved in.
This is a good, light read. It flows through a dozen or so lives, including Harman’s, with surprises along the way. It provokes a variety of emotions in the reader and delivers the promise every memoir should make. The Blue Cotton Gown tells one midwife’s story in a way that make her readers empathize, sympathize, and wish they might have gone down that path.
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