The Brooklyn Rail

Shayne Terry’s Leave: A Postpartum Account isn’t exactly a memoir, but tells of her heinous postpartum experience involving a painful obstetric anal sphincter injury. This account rejects a traditional narrative arc, so readers shouldn’t expect a resolution—there isn’t one; not in the book, nor in Terry’s life. And while we’re talking disclaimers, Leave isn’t Terry processing her experiences (she did that in therapy), but rather transforming what happened to her into art.

Because while this book situates her personal experiences amid larger societal issues—our broken healthcare system, paid family leave, opioid addiction, intergenerational trauma—Terry’s weaving of these things together while highlighting the connection between birth and death, and how both are transformative experiences, makes Leave unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s slim enough to read in one sitting, unless, like me, you’re so captivated by Terry’s prose that you need to stop and underline each stunning sentence. This is a book that demands attention, reflection, and revisiting. Each time I do, I see something more. The first time I read it was “Wow, that’s really beautifully written.” The second time was more awe: “How does she manage to tie all these threads together?”, and the third: “Gosh, this is not only brilliant, but important; everyone should read this book.” I say “everyone,” and not only women or mothers because pain and death are universal experiences, our healthcare system is abysmal, and we as a society need more stories dealing with reproductive health. Leave tackles these topics without feeling like an “issue book;” rather, it’s a meditation on transformation and so much more.

While Terry is Brooklyn-based, she and I hail from the same hometown. When she was in town over the holidays we met at a coffee shop, and her husband cared for their child while we talked about her art—a setup that felt like a nod to the book itself. In our conversation which follows we discussed care, how pain doesn’t have a purpose, and the belief that birth and death are the same portal.

Rachel León (Rail): Let’s begin with tone. The voice lends an intimate tone, and allows the book to never come off as complain-y. Was tone ever a concern?

Shayne Terry: Tone was definitely a concern. You were one of my first readers, and when I sent it, I told you I wanted the book to be full of love. I knew that early draft really wasn’t, and I didn’t want it to come off as complaining or self-pitying—that’s not how I felt. I actually feel really grateful for this experience, and for all the people who helped me through it. But while it was happening, I was walking the fine line between my natural disposition of looking on the sunny side and being able to call a hard thing hard. Sometimes things are just shitty, and it can be powerful to name that, acknowledge what’s happening, and still, if you’re able, see the beauty. I wanted to make sure the book reflected that reality. 

I don’t think of myself as a funny person, but a few readers have said there are funny parts. That makes me happy because I find a lot of humor in life. 

Rail: I love the humor. And I think the book is full of love, especially since so much of it is about care: your need to be taken care of post-birth, the baby’s need for care, childcare, New York’s Paid Family Leave Act feels like systemic care. 

Terry: One of the things the book is about is how hard it is to ask for care as a woman, as a Midwesterner, and as someone raised with that Protestant work ethic—you know, put your head down and get the thing done. The book deals with being able to say: I need to be taken care of, too. 

After the birth, I felt like I “should’ve” been focusing on caring for my child, and not being able to do that—and also having to admit I needed to be cared for myself—was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through. 

Rail: We’re talking when your baby is now a five-year-old, and the book mentions pain three years post-birth, so in the spirit of care, I want to ask: how are you? Do you still experience physical pain? 

Terry: As a result of the birth, I have four prolapsed organs, so now I deal with symptoms from that, and not all of them are painful. Some are just uncomfortable or annoying, and the pain comes in cycles. The book focuses on the postpartum period, and that pain was different. At the beginning it was the pain of healing from the birth injury. Then I started to realize something wasn’t normal because the pain wasn’t going away. I was really resistant to a conventional narrative arc where something happens and then there’s a resolution, because there’s still no resolution. I’ve stopped expecting there to be one. It’s an ongoing journey of the body that we’re all on. Most people are dealing with a health issue that’s not easily resolvable. I don’t experience my chronic pain in the same way I experienced pain in the immediate postpartum period because it’s now become the journey that my body’s on. This is the body I’m living in. 

I’m doing okay now. I’ve learned how to live in a body that has pelvic organ prolapse. I’ve also learned what my options are if I get to a point where I’m no longer able to manage it. Just understanding what’s going on inside my body and what my options are makes it easier to live with. 

I’m speaking from a very privileged place right now, because I was only able to get to where I am because I have a “good” health insurance plan that enabled me to see many specialists. I have a job where I was able to take the time off work to see all those specialists. I was able to pay my high deductible to get all of the tests required to figure out what’s going on with my body. There are so many people out there dealing with this who don’t know what’s happening in their body, and that’s a scarier place. When you’re experiencing pain and don’t know why, it becomes a mental battle. Like, when I go for a walk, am I hurting myself further? Pain plus fear is probably the worst combination. 

Rail: At one point you question if this birth injury made you a worse version of yourself, and then reflect on how the purpose of pain isn’t to make us better people. Purpose and labels of “good” or “bad” aside, how has this experience transformed you? 

Terry: When I wrote that, I was thinking about this societal expectation that when you’ve experienced a certain kind of pain, it “should” make you more empathetic, at least to that same kind of pain. 

I write about my grandmother’s chronic pain in the book. My grandmother understood what I was going through better than anybody in my life, and was so empathetic and caring because she’d been living in pain for so long. I’m not a “find the meaning in your pain” kind of person. I don’t think there are silver linings to pain, but that’s why my grandma was able to connect with me at that time on a level that many people couldn’t, and why it was easier for me to talk to her about what I was going through. I didn’t even talk to my husband about it, or to many of my close friends. 

The empathy I experienced with my grandma? I was like, “I should be that way with other people, too,” and yet at the time, I was still inside of my own experience of pain and found it hard to connect to other people. And that’s okay. I don’t believe there’s a reason for pain. I think pain is something we all deal with, and we all deal with it in different ways; there’s no right or wrong way. Sometimes you just have to figure out the best way to get through it without causing pain for somebody else.

I got to a place where I gave myself permission to just get through it. I didn’t want to self-medicate because I’d seen my grandma do that. I understand why people do it, and I understand why she did. But I knew that I’d want to write about the experience, so I didn’t want to numb myself to it. I really paid attention to it, because I’m a writer; this is what we do. Maybe that’s also my way of coping. 

Rail: I asked because the book is so much about transformation—and you transformed your experiences into art. You took these hard things and created something beautiful with this nonlinear narrative, bringing in things that intersect, which I hadn’t realized until I read this: like birth and death. 

Terry: That’s how I find my people: “Do you believe birth and death are the same portal?”

Someone recently asked me if writing this book was therapeutic. And I was like, “No, therapy is therapeutic.” What I wanted to do is make art.

I was in therapy at the same time, processing things. The book was not me processing things; it was me taking an experience that happened to me and making art out of it. It wasn’t therapeutic; it wasn’t cathartic. As writers, I feel like we are given assignments, and the assignment is the life you have. You have to figure out, what’s my assignment? It was very clear to me early on that this was an assignment. I didn’t know what it was going to look like at first, so I started taking notes. I thought it would be an essay, and then the essay turned into what I ultimately landed on. I wanted it to be an art object. I wanted it to be something that people could hold in their hands. I wanted it to be beautiful.

It was very important to me that the object itself be beautiful because I found the whole experience meaningful and beautiful. It was more life than I had ever lived before, all of life happening at the same time: the pain, the grief, the joy of a new baby, the healing of revisiting my relationships with my mother, my grandmother, and my sister, and the deaths of my grandparents. There was so much life happening at once, and that is one of the most beautiful things you can experience.

I don’t think I see everything as clearly anymore, but at that time, everything was so clear to me: the portal was so clear to me. My death was so clear to me. My friend Heather, who’s in the book, has a lot of experience with psychedelics, which I do not, but I feel like the way I talk about this and the way she talks about guiding people through psychedelic experiences are very similar. Giving birth was a mind-opening, transformative experience. I had been to the portal. However the labor and birth goes, you go to the door. Is that how it was for you? 

Rail: Oh for sure. 

Terry: You go right up to the door and almost go through it. You can’t help but be changed after that. I’m really glad I did it. And I’m glad I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, because I wouldn’t have done it. 

Rail: My sister once said going through birth made her even more pro-choice, because no one should ever be forced to go through that. This book offers a deeper look at the issue and ongoing battle of reproductive justice and choice amid our broken health care system. 

Terry: If I hadn’t already been radicalized, giving birth definitely would have radicalized me. 

I want to be careful about what I say here because I don’t want to be fear mongering about birth. I truly believe that there’s no place for fear in birth. I’m glad I went into birth with no fear because I had an empowering labor, and I’m glad I had that experience. So no fear in birth. That said, there are physical risks to pregnancy and birth that many of those in power in this country don’t respect, and don’t seem to understand or care about. Nobody should be forced to go through that if they don’t want to, if they’re not ready to, if they have a health issue that is going to exacerbate those risks. Any reason for not wanting to give birth is a valid reason for not wanting to give birth.

On top of that, our health insurance system is so broken that going into giving birth, you don’t know how much it’s going to cost, and you have to wait for the bill to arrive, even if you have “good” health insurance. You call ahead of time and ask how much it is going to cost, and they can’t tell you. You can’t plan for it. And at the same time, you’re facing sky-high childcare costs. And if, like me, you have some sort of complication from the birth, you’re also paying for your new health issue that you didn’t have before. This is what’s keeping a lot of young families living paycheck to paycheck and putting them in debt. There shouldn’t be medical debt in this country that is so wealthy. The whole thing is obviously very broken. 

Rail: And then returning to work under capitalism where parental leave is not a given.  

Terry: We need national paid family leave, and it should be provided by the government and paid for by our taxes. I work for the company my mom started when I was a kid. It’s a small business with twenty employees, and when I wrote the book we had no paid parental leave. We now offer paid parental leave, and I’m now a managing director at the company, so I can see why we didn’t for a long time. It’s the right thing to do because the government isn’t doing it, but it’s really hard for a small business to offer paid parental leave, or to provide good health insurance. We’re getting into a whole other territory now, but in this wealthy country, what is stopping us from providing universal health care and paid family leave? 

There’s a common refrain among new mothers on the internet: you get back to work after having a baby, and somebody’s like, “How was your vacation?” It’s obviously not a vacation—you’re taking care of a new human, and that’s freaking hard. And that’s the best case scenario. In others, you’re dealing with your own health issues or a major surgery. 

That’s another reason I wanted to write the book: to show people this is one way that birth can go. 

Rail: The book also looks at intergenerational trauma. And, in the case of your grandmother, how there can be a link between physical and emotional pain. 

Terry: I obviously could never be inside of her body to know for sure, but she was a person who was in both physical and emotional pain, and it was very clear that they were feeding each other. I think the emotional pain came first; it started when she was so young. I wanted this book to honor that by paying attention to it. Her pain was something that she talked about a lot—I think because she never totally felt heard. I wanted to look at it, pay attention to it, and spend time thinking about it. I want to make sure that I’m not passing pain down—you can’t totally control it, but there are certain themes in my family that I want to end with me. My friend Randle Browning wrote a powerful song called “Stops With Me” about intergenerational trauma. We’re not going to pass these things down. We’re going to look at them, recognize them for what they are, give them the space they need to be free. 

My grandmother died a little over a year ago. She never read the book. My mom asked me not to publish it until after she died, which I didn’t exactly obey. I got the book contract while my grandma was still alive, but I had this feeling that she would be okay with it. I think she would be proud of me. 

Rail: There are so many themes to discuss, but I’d like to end on the art. The book’s ending is gorgeous. Everything is written in the present tense until the ending, which is in the future tense. 

Terry: I wanted to keep it in the present tense because I wanted it to feel close and urgent. I also resisted past tense because none of this is done. I wanted it to feel like it’s up in the air still, because that is how it feels to me. 

The past tense didn’t feel right to me, just like calling it a memoir doesn’t feel right to me. I called it an account—this is my account of the events. If I wrote this story again today, it would be completely different; this was the account I could give at that time. Now, I would tell the story differently, and I wanted to make sure that that was felt in the telling, as well.