hemingway – Narrative with Valerie Lute

Like Catherine, the love interest in A Farewell to Arms, I recently experienced stalled labor, resulting in a C-section. I wrote this email to Heavy Bored host Andrew Wittstadt the other day.

Hi Andrew,

Thought you might like an update. When we discussed [Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms], I was pretty unworried about pregnancy and labor complications. But I ended up having serious complications at the end of my pregnancy and actually needed a C-section. Not only that, but I had a bleed on the operating table! But luckily it’s not 1917. One thing that they do differently now though, is that even though a C-section is a major surgery, they keep you awake so you can experience the birth of your child. But that also means if things go wrong, you are lying there listening to them talk about an arterial bleed and calling for back up and discussing whether or not to perform a historectomy. Pretty scary stuff, but modern medicine is amazing.

The baby was healthy and perfect from the beginning, but I’ve had a bit of a recovery. I have some conditions they are still monitoring.

I’ve attached a photo I took while writing this.

–Valerie

If you haven’t listened yet, Andrew and I discussed Hemingway’s legacy, anti-war literature, and reading A Farewell to Arms while pregnant.

My discussion about Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms with Andrew Wittstadt on the Heavy Bored Podcast

What does it mean for a work of literature to be universal? In the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary, The Vietnam War, there is an interview with a female North Vietnamese soldier. Before she left home to serve the communist cause, her parents gave her a copy of A Farewell to Arms. She helped to build the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the illicit road through Cambodia and Laos that brought armaments to the Viet Cong in the south. At night, when the work was done, the road she had just built would be bombed by the Americans. While she was huddling in a trench, waiting out the bombardment, she would read A Farewell to Arms. She said the novel connected her to all the soldiers in history who ever suffered in war.

Join Andrew and I as we discuss Hemingway as a universal writer, a white male writer, an anti-war writer, and more.

If you can’t get enough Hemingway, be sure to also check out my Three Writing Prompts Inspired by Hemingway.

Tag: hemingway

Birth announcement and A Farewell to Arms follow up

A Farewell to Arms on Heavy Bored Podcast