HUMAN BLUES

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.