It has a dreadful cover, but this was the book I needed three months ago

Emma Tom, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Hormones: Your One-Stop Survival Guide to Staying Sane During Your Pregnancy, Harper Collins, 2009.

As a Proselytiser About Truth in Pregnancy, I have been frustrated by the lack of written information available around about the emotional aspects of pregnancy. Uncertainty, terror, anxiety, agitation, despair... all of these reactions are mentioned only in passing, if at all. At times, this silence has appeared to confirm that I am the only woman in the entire world to have not been thrilled at being pregnant, which in turn has led me to feeling isolated and something of a freak.

In fact there is a lack of literature on pregnancy that is in any way irreverent or light, as if preganancy were simulatenously unquestionably wonderful, but also very significant and serious. There is one notable exception, Kaz Cooke's Up the Duff, which has for a decade reassured women that having to buy supersize undies is to be expected, that relatives and in-laws can be both well-meaning and excruciatingly annoying, and that being pregnant is quite uncomfortable, thankyou very much. Cooke's book is divided into weekly sections and features both hard information, and a fictionalised pregnancy diary written by Hermione, a character who clearly has much in common with Cooke herself. It was with Hermione's experiences that I most readily identified, though I also appreciated Cooke's sarcastic or sly asides on some of the advice commonly given to women at various stages of pregnancy.

A new book, however, has taken over Cooke's mantle as the most relevant and hilarious book available on pregnancy. Attack of the Fifty-Foot Hormones, by Emma Tom, though furnished with absolutely dreadful cover, provides an invaluable addition to the pregnancy book market. It focuses far more upon the emotional aspects of the experience than on the physical - and what a relief that is. As Tom writes,

'Thousands of words are devoted to varicose veins and dicky knees and why your ginormous boobs are turning up at bus stops five minutes before the rest of you. But how you feel about about those things is glossed over as if it doesn't count. As if the panic, fear and depression are somehow less difficult and debilitating than the nausea, fatigue and ouchy nipples.'

Hallelujah! The woman gets it! Of course there is a place for explaining physical changes, but there surely is a place for discussing emotional changes too, and it is this that has been overlooked. 'For me,' writes Tom, 'the emotional aspects of pregnancy were far more taxing than the physical ones because so few of my preggers books took them seriously or provided useful advice.' Hence this book, which sprang from her experience of being pregnant with and giving birth to her daughter Alice.

Like Cooke, Tom includes a weekly pregnancy diary, but with a difference. This time the character is not fictionalised, but presented as Tom herself. Of course, I am sure there is still embellishment and retrospective editing at work here: the diaries are too funny, too eloquent, and too attentive to detail to represent a pregnancy in real time. (Or am I excusing my own lack of regular diary-keeping here? Hmmm.) However, just knowing that a real person would claim these experiences as their own gives this diary a power that Cooke's Hermione never possessed. Hermione, I sensed, was a composite picture, a carefully constructed woman who experienced just enough of the ridiculousness of pregnancy to be comical, but not enough trauma to scare other women off. Emma Tom, meanwhile, just lays it all out for us to read: the physical changes, the change to her plans represented by the pregnancy, and most of all, her emotional rollercoaster ride through nine months. It is remarkable that she manages to make this a hilarious account as well.

In doing so, she has provided a heroine for those of us who struggle with the emotional side-effects of what she calls fifty-foot hormones. Not only that, but in the other sections of the book devoted to providing information, she unpicks the emotional issues plaguing both herself and, potentially, her readers. Consider these subheadings, scattered through the book: 'So you're psychiatrically mobid', 'Glowing schmowing' and 'I hate being pregnant, does this mean I'll be a bad mother?'. That last one in particular made me want to weep: so terrified was I of the answer to this question (definitely 'yes', I thought) that I didn't even have the courage to ask it in the first place. And yet here Tom is, laying it bare and reassuring me that the answer is, 'In a word: no'. Thank the Goddess. I mean, really.

Tom also includes testimony from other women about their pregnancy stories, gathered over what she claims were 'hundreds of interviews', testimony that focuses on emotional reactions. This to me is a slightly less successful device than either the diary or the practical information. Many of these 'interviews' seem more likely to be written accounts by professional women, women with access to computers and an eloquence that undoubtedly gives the book a seamlessness, but does little to portray the confusion that so often accompanies what is emotionally taboo. It is not that I didn't identify with these women, it is more that their accounts were, like Hermione's, constructed well after the fact with a few to being logical, readable and simple. Which is fine - it's just that emotions are not like that at all! They are messy and contradictory and at times debilitating. Perhaps it is simply a function of these women reflecting back on their experiences from a distance; perhaps women in the throes of antenatal depression (or just confused by pregnancy) would be better able to explain how hard it really can be when you are in it.

In any case, I am so excited by the publication of this book just a couple of months ago. My best friend sent it to me after hearing Tom interviewed, and I am so grateful she did. If you or anyone you know is experiencing pregnancy confusion or antenatal depression, this the book to track down. Emma Tom will make you feel normal, sane and in good company while exploring your reactions to being up the duff.