OSHETSKY: Well, my daughter is Patricia Taxxon. Well, and you've said that your daughter consulted on this book. There were other things that were unusual about her behavior and that people didn't know what to expect from her, sometimes. And that was my experience with mothering my girl growing up, too although she never spat up owl pellets. And they just go on their way of being who they are.Īnd of course, that kind of behavior would not necessarily go down well in preschool or be something that other people would necessarily understand. They don't care if you don't like it when they cough up owl pellets. And I guess I think of owls as very solitary, independent. So to me, it was, like, closer to the truth to call this baby in the story an owl baby, closer to my experience. But, you know, I was really trying to capture what it was like to raise my daughter, who was not as easy a child as maybe I would have liked, very nonconforming, and she was like an owl.

Have a baby with an owl, especially not a female owl. OSHETSKY: Well, you know, I've gotten feedback about how surreal my book is, and I have to accept that, that you can't really. KURTZLEBEN: Well, of all the animals you could have picked, why owls? As I understand it, chouette does mean owl in French, by the way. It likes hunting small animals and eating them and has other anti-social behaviors that are a challenge for both parents. It behaves in a way that's perfectly fine for an owl but not necessarily the way you want your baby to behave.

The mom, Tiny, does go ahead and have the baby, and it is indeed an owl baby. And on the other hand, her husband is very excited and doesn't really have an expectation of having any challenges with fatherhood. I think that Tiny has a pretty good idea that her child is going to be different from the beginning, and she's not sure if she wants to go ahead with the pregnancy, first of all, because she's very aware that it's going to take everything to raise the baby the way it deserves to be raised. The narrator, a woman called Tiny, gives birth to what she calls an owl baby, and the story proceeds from there. You may wonder - how could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl? I, too, am astounded because my owl lover was a woman. Two weeks later, I learn that I'm pregnant. The next morning, I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl lover's embrace. (Reading) I dream I'm making tender love with an owl. KURTZLEBEN: Now, there may be no better way to introduce this book to our listeners than to just have you read the first few paragraphs. Claire Oshetsky is here to tell us about it. Its author, Claire Oshetsky, calls it a parable about motherhood, and it is an engrossing, surreal portrayal of motherhood. It is by turns poetic, gory, heartbreaking and strange. The new novel 'Chouette' is a lots of things at once.

Chouette by claire oshetsky