February 1, 2022
On her fourth album, singer-songwriter Aviva Rosner shares her struggles to have a child (and resistance to assisted reproductive technology), and fans and critics respond explosively. Albert's novels include 2015's multi-best-booked After Birth and 2008's Sami Rohr finalist The Book of Dahlia, both variously described as acerbic, blistering, and compelling, so be prepared. With a 60,000-copy first printing.
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Starred review from May 23, 2022
Ascendant singer-songwriter Aviva Rosner navigates a bowdlerizing music industry, a judgmental Jewish family, and the Faustian prospect of “industrial fertility” in this bighearted and riotously funny performance from Albert (After Birth). To do so, Aviva, “in the green half of her thirties,” draws on the rebellious spirit of Amy Winehouse, who, according to Aviva’s narration, spent her all too short career “giving zero fucks.” Albert convinces the reader of Aviva’s sparkle by showing listeners’ reactions to her in low-key scenes, like an open mic set in Albany, N.Y., where Aviva lives with her teacher husband, Sam. Story lines develop around Aviva’s crush on another musician whose path she expects to cross while on tour, and with whom she continuously flirts despite her devotion to hunky “townie” Sam; and a series of DMs with Winehouse’s Mum—but what drives the unrelenting narrative is Aviva’s intense and frustrated desire for a child. She and Sam have been “hoping,” but not “trying,” the difference being she’s not doing IVF. Her unapologetic feelings about the latter, which she views as an expression of entitlement by wealthy, straight, cisgendered women, and as a physical violation, show up on her new folk-punk record, Womb Service, which the diehards love, but her manager and the internet aren’t so sure about, especially after taking in her incendiary tweets (“hey cuntrags, what personal struggle of vital importance are you ignoring whilst you sit on this site jerking off your diseased ego?”). Meanwhile, her mother insists she do whatever it takes to have a baby. The depth of feeling, range of ideas, and spiky provocations amount to a Bellow-worthy wave of blistering prose. By the end, it pummels the reader into submission.
June 30, 2022
Indie musician Aviva Rosner's career is taking off with the release of her fourth album, but all she can think about is having a baby. Desperate to get pregnant but wary of assisted reproductive technology, she explores an array of alternate options, including fertility doctors, special diets, sex therapists, and yoga. On tour for her album--appropriately titled Womb Service--she channels her frustration, ambivalence, and anger into her performances and in ferocious interviews with clueless music journalists and influencers, to the horror of her longtime manager. Along the way, she's guide by the Rabbi (her therapist) and her supportive but bemused partner, Sam, and she finds a kindred spirit in departed rock legend Amy Winehouse--""patron saint of insatiable, implacable Jewish girls""--that culminates in a cathartic visit with Amy's mum. Told over the course of nine menstrual cycles, Albert's follow-up to After Birth (2015) is by turns poignant, hilarious, and scathing. Fans of Dana Spiotta's Wayward (2021) and Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl (2020) will enjoy Aviva's rollicking journey to self-acceptance in a culture obsessed with motherhood.
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August 1, 2022
As her creative powers ripen around the release of her fourth album, Womb Service, alt-folk-punk-blues anti-darling Aviva Rosner is consumed by the frustrated need to have a baby twinned with a spiraling obsession with the late Amy Winehouse. Embarking on tour for what's hoped to be her breakout album, Aviva grapples with the eternal quandary of having it all and of keeping what's expected of her in balance with what she desires: She wants a successful music career while maintaining creative control; she wants to come home to her almost-textbook-perfect husband while indulging the occasional boundary-pushing dalliance; she wants a baby born of her own body without the intrusion of conventional medicine; veneration without the destruction of runaway fame; leaving a legacy without it being twisted to others' purposes. Albert catalogs the nitty-gritty rise and fall of each menstrual cycle, each recurring anxiety, each lapse into rumination on the death and, Aviva believes, widespread misunderstanding of the iconic Winehouse, each yoni steam and psychedelic journey undertaken in service of a dream that feels like a birthright denied, and traveling alongside Aviva on the long, fraught road of infertility can induce in the reader a feeling of claustrophobic recrudescence, like you're trapped in it all in real time. Aviva is someone many have known--or been--a version of, barreling through nuance with a dubiously informed politics and worldview yet a (nearly) unshakeable conviction in her own rectitude and righteousness, embodying that well-worn saying, "I was a perfect parent before I had children" (sub parent with any number of other occupations prone to abuse by the public), talented yet simultaneously under- and overconfident. Still, as often as Aviva's anxieties and flaws--and they are considerable (and not always handled with the narrative berth needed to avoid a creeping sense of complicity in the reader)--are fed by various lopsided satellites in her orbit, they're also checked by moments of real insight from wiser (and often ignored) figures in her life who attempt to insulate her against fully self-obliterating in a monomaniacal blaze. Albert offers much to mull on the ethics of reproduction and the many permutations of inheritance.
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