Kid Gloves

Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos is Lucy Knisley's 6th graphic novel. It details her experience trying to conceive a child, her eventual pregnancy and the life threatening delivery of her baby. It has been written with low key humor. Kid Gloves was published in February, 2019.

Lucy begins this graphic memoir with her first introduction to contraceptives when she was a teenager.  She volunteered for Planned Parenthood's Peer-to-Peer Educator Program. She was trained about sexual health and contraceptives and then informed her classmates about what she learned and passed out condoms and pamphlets. She quickly notes that when she became an adult she realized how little information she received. Her attempts to use a diaphragm, the pill and an IUD had terrible side effects which required her to have surgery.

After she and her husband decided to have a child they thought conceiving would be easy. It was. However, Lucy had several miscarriages and found out one in four pregnancies is miscarried. She wondered why the Planned Parenthood classes didn't give this information.

She fell into grief after each miscarriage and could not work. Her female friends and acquaintances all told  her every old wives tale about pregnancy and miscarriage which she dutifully covered in a section called Miscarriage Myths.

Finally Lucy had a successful pregnancy that was fraught with nausea, insomnia and undiagnosed eclampsia which resulted in an emergency Caesarean and 2 days of unconsciousness. However, she got the baby she wanted. Still, she is wondering why she was not taught about all of these possibilities of pregnancy when she was a teenager.

I thought the author chose a clever theme, sex education, for her story.  Using her high school sex ed classes through Planned Parenthood was a brilliant backdrop for her own experience. In addition, while this story was about a serious topic it was told with humor. The humor was low key probably because of the subject matter. Also, the reader could feel the emotions of the author through each stage of her pregnancy experience. The emotions were both written and drawn on her many  facial expressions and those of her husband.

I learned a few things too.  I did not know that one in four pregnancies are miscarried. The author discusses many misconceptions about the entire maternity process that I would recommend the book to a newly pregnant woman. There is much to learn here if you didn't have a great sex education as a youth.

The artwork was done in line drawings primarily in a comic strip format. Bright colors are used throughout the book except for the two day period of time when the author was unconscious after the delivery of her baby. Here, she uses black and white drawings and the writing is from the point of view of her husband.

Kid Gloves was a quick read. I loved it and read it again the day after I finished it. It is informative but in a funny way. I love the use of bright colors and perhaps they bring some lightness to this serious book. I borrowed this book from my public library but feel that it belongs in my graphic novel collection. I will probably buy it.

5 out of 5 stars!