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About the Book

Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.

Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak. 

With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision. 

While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species.

Praise for Nine Moons

“A Peruvian journalist’s vibrant musings on pregnancy and childbirth. In this whip-smart follow-up to Sexographies (2018), the author details her nine months of pregnancy as anything but pastel. Wiener interweaves facts on embryonic development and other scientific elements with visceral experience and accounts of her rabbit-hole internet searches to reveal the anxiety of her first full-term pregnancy…. Such dark, fertile forays signal Wiener's original take on the simultaneously common and unique experience of pregnancy…. The author's ruminations are consistently provocative, digging into areas many are not willing to go…. Wiener's reflections on her relationship with her mother, which included microaggressions and tense exchanges, are also illuminating…. Refreshingly literary and offbeat—a mother-to-be book for firebrands.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“With certain writers it doesn’t matter what the book is about, because the brain that created it is so euphoric, so wicked, so irascibly specific, that you want to clear out a corner of your own headspace and beckon the author inside as a permanent tenant. It is for this reason that I, a person who has never been pregnant and has little interest in reproduction, can recommend a book about a pregnant lady who watches trash TV and dreams that she’s going to give birth to a monkey…. [Gabriela Wiener’s] mind is a beautiful and unique organ…. It’s the sort of book you will read and pass on to your friends with a note that says TRUST ME taped to the cover. You needn’t possess a baby to enjoy it. Having once been a fetus is enough.”

—Molly Young, New York Magazine

“If Angela Garbes mind melded with Samantha Irby and Jami Attenberg, and wrote specifically about sex, and oh, there's a baby somewhere in there. I LOVE THIS BOOK. I want everyone to read it. I want to learn Spanish so I can read everything the Peruvian author Gabriela Wiener has to say.”

—Anne Ishii, Letters from Annie

“Provocative, offbeat, and always insightful, Gabriela Wiener’s follow-up to Sexographies does not disappoint. The book charts Wiener’s thoughts on pregnancy and motherhood during her own pregnancy with her signature daring and candidness. The second of her books to be translated into English, Nine Moons reads like the delightfully uncomfortable sex ed class you didn’t know you wanted.”

—Nika, Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY)

“From the Peruvian author of Sexographies comes another brave and candid exploration, this time of pregnancy and motherhood. Taking no prisoners, Wiener guides readers through her nine months of pregnancy and all the misinformation, stereotypes, questions, misgivings, fears and confusion she confronts along the way.”

—Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine

Praise for Sexographies

“No other writer in the Spanish-speaking world is as fiercely independent and thoroughly irreverent as Gabriela Wiener. Constantly testing the limits of genre and gender, Wiener´s work as a cronista (which roughly translates, but is by no means a direct synonym, of nonfiction writer) has bravely unveiled truths some may prefer remain concealed about a range of topics, from the daily life of polymorphous desire to the tiring labor of maternity.”

—Cristina Rivera Garza, author of The Iliac Crest


“This collection of essays [opens] on the outskirts of Lima, jumps to a swinger’s party in Barcelona, and next a squirt expert’s apartment. This book can feel psychologically hazardous to read; it pushes you to answer the questions Wiener asks herself: Would I? Could I? Will I?”

—Angela Ledgerwood, Esquire Best Books of 2018 


“These are essays of unabashed honesty and uncommon freedom of mind, bravely reported and beautifully composed. I hadn’t known how hungry I’d been for this book, how I’d needed it and wanted other books to be it. Sexographies is an antidote and a revelation, and Gabriela Wiener is a brilliant documenter of sex and life as they really are.”

—Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others


“In her native Peru, Gabriela Wiener has a reputation as a gonzo journalist who takes an active role in whatever subject she investigates, which as often as not involves sex, and not the vanilla variety. In this collection, her first translated into English, we meet a notorious polygamous pornographer; go to 6&9, a Barcelona sex club; interview the cruel Lady Monique de Nemours, a world-class dominatrix; visit Vanessa, a member of the European community of Latin American trans sex workers; get a first-hand look at the perils of threesomes; and explore other topics a tad too risqué to even name in a family newspaper. Suffice to say, Wiener’s free-wheeling style is hugely entertaining.”

—Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star


"Reading Gabriela Wiener is a joy. Over the years, her work has made me cry, laugh, hurt, and most importantly, dream. Her essays are daring, intimate, and honest, containing the self-awareness of a poet and the sharp focus of a marksman. I'd follow her anywhere."

—Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles


“One of the most interesting writers of this generation is Gabriela Wiener, a Peruvian journalist best known for her high-spirited explorations of female sexuality.... Wiener is witty and fast-paced; many of her experiences, sexual and otherwise, are hard-won, territories explored and sometimes conquered, despite her neurotic misgivings, with courage and aplomb. Part of her appeal lies in the fact that she sometimes writes about sexual topics that have not been well explored, especially by women, and a sense of incredulity is part of the pleasure of reading her work. ‘Is she really going to do that?’ the reader wonders. ‘Is she really going to write (and so openly) about doing that?’ And then she does, and there’s a slight but perceptible shift in the world because she did.”

—Lisa Fetchko, Los Angeles Review of Books


“With sizzling prose and journalistic attentiveness, Wiener honors the no-clothes rule. She exposes her readers to not only her body, but also to the neuroses, fears, and fantasies that come with it. True to the first-person style of gonzo journalism, each of Wiener’s fifteen transgressive crónicas pull readers into penetrative commentaries on infidelity, abortion, and threesomes, not to mention the ever-elusory ‘Ninja Squirt.’... Sexographies strikes the delicate balance between carnal and curious…. It [expands] the meaning of what pleasure in life can be, sexual or otherwise.”

—Madeline Day, The Paris Review


“What Peruvian essayist and ‘gonzo’ journalist, Wiener, does in this collection is endlessly fascinating. Whether experiencing sexual subcultures or an ayahuasca trip, she uses herself as the point of departure to delve into the infinite manifestations of being human.”

—Keaton, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX), Best Nonfiction Books of 2018


“Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian sex writer, and Sexografias is a book of her collected essays. However, she doesn’t just stay on the carnal, and uses her explorations of egg donation, swingers parties, cruising, and squirting as channels into meditations on motherhood, death, and immigration, all while staying sharp and funny and wild.”

—Alejandra Oliva, Remezcla

About the Author

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist. Her books include Sexographies, Nine Moons, Llamada perdida (Missed Call), Dicen de mí (What They Say about Me), and the book of poems Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu (Exercises for the Hardening of the Spirit). Her work has appeared in national and international anthologies and has been translated into English, Portuguese, Polish, French, and Italian. Her first stories were published in the Peruvian narrative journalism magazine Etiqueta Negra. She was editor-in-chief of Marie Claire in Spain and now regularly publishes opinion columns in Eldiario.es, VICE, and the New York Times en Español, as well as a video column for lamula.pe. She won Peru’s National Journalism Award for an investigative report on a case of gender violence. She is the creator of several performances that she has staged with her family. She recently wrote and starred in the play Qué locura enamorarme yo de ti (How Crazy to Fall in Love with You). She has lived in Spain since 2004. @gabrielawiener

About the Translator

Jessica Powell received her BA in International Studies from Vassar College, her MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in UCSB’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo's novel Woman in Battle Dress (2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her dozens of other translations include Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (2016), a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award; Pablo Neruda’s book-length poem venture of the infinite man, the first-ever into English (2017); Edna Iturralde’s award-winning book, Green Was my Forest (2018); and Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise, co-translated with SJ Levine. She lives in Santa Barbara with her husband, Abe Powell, and their two children, Olivia and Leo.

THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED WITH SUPPORT FROM THE SPANISH MINISTRY OF CULTURE, EDUCATION, AND SPORT AND ACCIÓN CULTURAL ESPAÑOLA

BOOK DETAILS

Hardcover: $22
ISBN: 9781632062239
eBook ISBN: 9781632062246
Publication date: May 26, 2020 
5" x 7.125" • 240 pages
Memoir: Motherhood / Childbirth / Women / Feminism
Territory: World English

Books by Gabriela Wiener