INTERVIEW: Erin Anadkat interviews Shayne Terry about her debut book Leave: A Postpartum Account

"...what's going to happen to me? What is this going to be like?"

Shayne Terry had a difficult birth of her son in 2019, undergoing extreme birth trauma—OASIS (obstetric anal sphincter injuries) and a third-degree tear, which later led to pelvic organ prolapse. During a Zoom interview we did this past winter, we talked about Leave: A Post-Partum Account (Autofocus Books, 2025), a nonfiction work of her postpartum period in the form of a long essay and a series of vignettes, many of which were written in notes on her phone while in recovery.

In recently giving birth to my own daughter in late 2023, I also underwent a tear that left me unable to walk normally for three weeks. I myself still do not feel fully “healed” from my birth injury a year and a half later, and one of the things we discussed during our conversation was that maybe we never really fully heal from our birth traumas as mothers. We also discussed the befuddling “unknowingness” of pregnancy, labor, delivery, and how the complex nature of maternal pain is almost never acknowledged with the empathy it deserves in American media, culture, and society.

Erin Anadkat: When I became pregnant, I realized there is this preconception of pregnancy, birth, and delivery both sanitized and romanticized in American media and culture. It’s kind of absurd when you consider the range of complexity that actually happens.

Shayne Terry: The water breaks, and then cut to baby being handed into Mom's arms. And Mom is perfectly coiffed.

EA: A lot of times, your water doesn't even break.

ST: Or it's usually not the first sign of labor, as movies and TV shows have led us to believe.

EA: I’m not sure if you felt like this before getting pregnant, but it all just seemed like such a vast unknown, I think because cultural ideas of becoming pregnant and having a baby are so plasticized. You knew something more complicated would be happening, but you had no way of knowing what it was until you were in it. Even still, when you watch contemporary movies or television, for the most part it’s an event depicted with a shiny façade, when it’s usually a pretty definitive reality.

ST: I agree, I didn't really feel like I had a full picture of what I was getting myself into. That said, one of the things that made me decide to try to get pregnant was, in the summer of 2018, I went to this “New Photography” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and one of the installations was Carmen Winant's My Birth. You had to walk through a big hallway to get from one part of the exhibit to another, and down this hallway, Winant had taped found images of women giving birth. There were thousands of them, completely covering the walls, real photographs of birth.

Carmen Winant, My Birth (2018)

I had been ambivalent about whether or not to try. Did I want kids? I wasn't sure. I probably would have been just as happy not having kids. And then I went to that exhibit, and I was transfixed by these images of women basically experiencing every single possible emotion a human being could experience. Looking at these photographs, there's joy, there's pain, there's shock and surprise. There's also, you know, grief there. It just seemed like they were going through it all. And I wanted that. You could tell it was human beings at their most animal. That was when I started trying to get pregnant.

One of the reasons it was so powerful is that every other thing you've ever seen about birth is so sanitized. And then suddenly, you're confronted with actual photographs of—I mean, some of the photographs are close-up shots of a baby’s head emerging. The perineum being completely stretched around the head, placentas dangling out of women who were standing up over birthing tubs. Real birth.

Cathy Park Hong wrote about this exhibit in Minor Feelings and noted that almost all the women [in the photographs] are white women. She said it made her feel walled off, and I can totally understand how you would have that experience if you are not a white woman, whereas I was able to see myself in all of these photos. Carmen Winant has said that it was hard to find photographs of non-white women giving birth, and that is part of the art—who gets to be photographed giving birth, whose birth stories get to be told, and whose birth stories are centered.

This is not part of Leave, but I actually had a positive, empowering labor. I was at home for most of the day letting labor happen as it happens, letting my body take the lead. That was what I wanted, and ultimately that was what I got for most of my labor, though not my delivery. And that's where my book picks up.

EA: What was the reason for titling your book Leave: A Postpartum Account?

ST: I called the project Leave because it was meant to document the period of my parental leave from work. At the start, I thought there would be a narrative arc that could be confined to that period—torn to whole, injured to healed—but that was not the case, and so the book covers a slightly longer period of time, but it deals with questions around what parental leave is for, what to do with a parental leave that doesn't look like one expected it to, and then of course people leaving—each other, old versions of themselves, this world.

EA: Can you describe for me how you would categorize your book? It's very short, 158 pages.

ST: It started as an essay, and I still kind of think of it as an essay. I call it an account, because I felt a little uneasy about it as a memoir. I don't think this is true of historical memoir, but with contemporary memoir the convention is there's some sort of arc. The character goes on a journey, there's resolution at the end. This main character has changed and grown. And I just didn't feel like any of that could happen in my book. I wanted it to be a straightforward account that somebody could read in a sitting or in a day, or that someone with fractured attention, say, a new parent, could read here and there over many weeks. And the process of it for me was very much an essay process. I had questions, and I was writing it to try to figure out the answers to those questions, about my own experience and what I'd just been through.

EA: When you say an account, what does that mean for you?

ST: An attempt to document things as they happened in order. I wrote it in the present tense, because I wanted to convey the experience as it happened. And I could do that because I wrote a lot of notes on my phone while it was happening, and I used those to put the book together later. That's the other thing about a memoir: often there's a narrator who's looking back and remembering what happened, and you're getting the benefit of hindsight and present-day information that they now have. I did very little of that in the book. Of course, with most memoir—and this is true of Leave—there's the person these things happened to, there's the person who wrote those things down at a certain point in time, and then there's the person the writer is today. And those people are very different. It all happened in 2019, I wrote most of it in 2021, and I've since continued living my life and changing as a person. I do feel like there are three people involved in the book.

I also wanted to break the fourth wall a little bit, and add in the opinions of some of the other people involved, some of the “characters” in the book, because they are real people who have different perspectives on what happened or what it means. And that felt like a way to honor my truth and memory of what happened, while also acknowledging I'm just one person, and not everybody agrees with me.

EA: Well, also, you yourself are going through this experience, but then so many other people share it with you, and then you are navigating that. The baby came from my body, and I am the one going through the physical afterwards of it. But family and friends are like, “it's our baby, too.”

ST: And it's our family history, too, and that's all very real. And those are other complicated things that memoirists deal with I was also dealing with.

EA: The severity of your tear during birth was extreme. You actually end up finding the definition for it yourself online, which is OASIS (obstetric anal sphincter injuries) and a third-degree tear. And then it is not until a few years after your birth that you are finally referred for surgery. It is bizarre how little doctors seem to know or understand postpartum medical issues as a body of knowledge. I had a hiatal hernia after birth, and it took me over a year to figure out what it was—no one could tell me, and I had to basically figure it out on my own, my general internist was no help. It’s like, who do you talk to? An acupuncturist ended up being the most helpful. Do you go to an acupuncturist?

ST: Yes, I just saw my acupuncturist last night, and she's been so much more helpful than most of the doctors I've seen during all of this.

EA: I had the same experience. I was curious if you had any thoughts on this topic, the lack of interest and knowledge in the medical field and specialty for women’s postpartum health.

ST: In part, it is systematized patriarchy. There has been so little research into women's health issues specifically, because there has been very little money given to these issues compared to men's health issues or issues that impact men. Something unexpected happened with my cervix during my pregnancy and the midwives were like, we don't really know anything about the cervix—that was the answer I got. It hasn't been studied, because, historically, comparatively, there hasn't been much money devoted to studying the cervix.

But also, it is our for-profit healthcare system. Even for doctors who are doing their very best and have the best of intentions, the system that we operate within does not incentivize them to be interested in medical mysteries. When you go to a doctor, you have ten minutes with them, maybe, before they have to see their next patient. And you're trying to tell them everything that's happened to you since you had a baby, which is—you could talk for days about it because so much happens. And you're trying to sum it up, and if there's something they don't understand, or that they have to ask more questions about, they often simply do not have the time. And not only are they not incentivized to spend the time that it would take to really understand the problem and try to help, they're often penalized for it. Medical practices and health systems lose money if they allow their doctors to chase these rabbit holes and try to actually help people.

And I think there are still amazing doctors out there who are very devoted to their patients, and who are trying to really help and make a difference. Actually, my gastroenterologist is one of them, and I owe so much to this man who I saw many times over a period of years. During those appointments he would ask the right questions and order the right tests, follow up, and we finally got to the bottom of my ongoing health issues from the birth injury, which it turns out are due to pelvic organ prolapse. And this is not his specialty, it was just that he actually cared and it was clear to him I was at the end of my line and had tried so much, and was so desperate for answers, and he was helpful. That's not the common experience that people have anymore.

EA: There’s such a range of specificity, in comparison to over-generalizations of the experience of having a baby within the context of media, culture, and the medical field. Everyone’s individual experience is so different, but over-generalizations make it difficult to grasp on to commonalities for women because they become so abstract. I also had a tear when I delivered my daughter, but it was so different than your tear, much less severe. Still, within medical classifications, they probably would both be referred to as “tears.” Do you think these over-generalizations can make it more difficult to identify specifics relevant for one’s own individual situation, as well as share in commonalities? You struck a balance between this in your book, of examining your own maternal lineage, within the context of a wider range of societal issues that women go through in having a baby.

ST: I've been thinking a lot about birth stories, and why many of us feel so drawn to birth stories. When I was trying to get pregnant, was pregnant, after I had my baby, I could not get enough birth stories. First, because I wanted to figure out, what's going to happen to me? What is this going to be like? And then afterward, I wanted to find someone else who had gone through the exact same thing. But the thing is, you never find that person. Yes, there are similarities. But then there are always things that are a little bit different. And I think that's actually one of the wonderful things about birth stories. There's no cliche birth story. You can read thousands of them, and they are all fascinating, at least to me and to many people I know. They're all different, and they're all trying to get at this thing that they never fully get at.

At the same time, no birth story will ever be completely satisfying, because we simply do not have the language to describe birth. That can make these mom groups feel a little isolating sometimes. We should be connecting over this thing that we've been through, and yet it's so hard to talk about, because there is no language. We've gotten close, but we haven't actually captured it.

One of the self-doubts I had when I was first writing this book was, who cares about your birth story? It's not going to mean anything to anybody, because their birth story is going to be totally different. So why even bother putting this out in the world? But I pushed beyond that self-doubt and I'm glad I did, because in early reactions to the book, people have told me I had a traumatic birth, and I found reading this book healing. And of course, that person's birth was totally different than mine. But just reading someone else's account of what happened to them can help you feel less alone, even if you didn't go through exactly the same thing.

Shayne Terry, Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff