Hi – I’m Sarah Bilston, author of Bed Rest. The novel was published by HarperCollins in the US in April 2006 and by Sphere in the UK in March 2007.
Bed Rest tells the story of Q (short for Quinn), a twenty-eight-year-old woman who gets put on bed rest for the last three months of her pregnancy.
WHY I DECIDED TO WRITE BED REST
I really enjoyed writing Q’s story, not least because I was placed on bed rest myself three years ago. Fortunately my husband and I are both academics, so he was able to work at home much of the time, and I spent most of my days reading (I teach and research English Literature at Trinity College, Hartford). I got through some pretty obscure novels that spring! But I couldn’t help wondering what life would be like if my husband couldn’t work from home, and if my normal life was centered in a busy office. How do you cope if you’re a hard-working professional woman and suddenly – everything stops?
I decided to write Bed Rest partly because I was intrigued by the challenges it presented (how do you make a novel set in one room exciting ...), and partly because I wanted to publicize the phenomenon. One in five of all pregnant women in the US spend some time on bed rest; that’s about 750,000 women a year. Yet I’d never even heard of the experience, and I quickly realized – from conversations with my doctors and from some independent research – that there was little evidence it actually worked. I hope that my novel will encourage people to talk about bed rest; I hope that it will encourage doctors and other health professionals to think about the serious consequences it has for women, both physical and psychological. I hope it will make people more aware of the experience generally, and I also hope it will provide some fun reading for women who are on bed rest themselves!
Incidentally, I found myself back on bed rest last year, for 15 weeks, in my twin pregnancy. And then for another 6 weeks after delivery, with pre-eclampsia. Fortunately all three of my children were born healthy, at 37 weeks gestation. Does bed rest work? Beats me! But if you'd like to read my op-ed in the New York Times on bed rest, and on the challenges bed resting women confront, click here (you have to sign up to read the article but it's free).
PREGNANCY AND BED REST - THOUGHTS ON THE EXPERIENCE
As a pregnant woman, most of us try to live a “normal” life for as long as possible. But when you’re placed on bed rest you become a body, so to speak; you’re a sort of incubator for your baby. No matter how much you want and love your unborn child, I think it’s impossible not to resent the fact that your body is no longer your own. I remember rereading Sylvia Plath’s poem “Metaphors” while I was on bed rest and being struck by her description of the pregnant woman as “a means, a stage, a cow in calf.” I’ve heard lots of literary critics describing these kinds of lines in Plath’s poetry, in which she seems ambivalent about pregnancy and motherhood, as evidence of her fragile mental state. I’ve even said this myself when teaching classes on Plath. But when I was pregnant I found myself thinking: surely she’s expressing an emotion that all pregnant women feel? One that becomes particularly pertinent, particularly inescapable if you find yourself on bed rest?
In fact I think there are lots of ways in which bed rest forces a woman to confront issues she may have had about pregnancy, and about herself, all along. If you’re stuck on your own in one room all day, there’s nothing to stop your mind running away with itself . . . My heroine finds herself pondering precisely why she got pregnant in the first place, what she thinks of her new (and ever-expanding) shape, and what kind of a mother she imagines she’s going to make. She even finds herself thinking, for the first time in years, about her own experience of childhood. I gave my heroine two peculiar sisters, a very eccentric mother, some knotty career issues, and a whole cart-load of problems with her husband, and as the novel unfolded I enjoyed watching her struggling to keep all these issues hidden at the back of her mind – struggling, in vain. Bed rest forces her to deal with them all. (As you’ll probably have guessed by now, bed rest is a trying experience for my heroine, but it’s a transformative one too.)
WHAT I’M WORKING ON NOW
I’m currently writing a sequel to Bed Rest, entitled Sleepless Nights, about the first year of motherhood. I’m thrilled to be working more on Q’s adventures. I’m also interested in reaching out to other people – women on bed rest, women who are pregnant, women who love to read, men who love to read . . . hence this website.
WHAT'S ON THIS SITE
You’ll find a series of things here, some by me, some by my heroine (so to speak). You’ll find my suggestions on how to survive bed rest, what websites to check out, what books to read, and so forth. Then you'll find "Q's List" - an alternative list created by my heroine of things to do on bed rest when you've done all the obvious (I'll update and modify this as time goes on). You'll also find more details about Q's life and family to introduce her to you. Then you'll find Q's blog. This will give me the opportunity to spend more time with my heroine, to flesh out the story I developed in the novel, and hopefully will give any passing readers a bit of light entertainment!
