Book Review: She Looks Just Like You by Amie Miller

by Alex Bleiberg

(Amie Miller and her partner, Jane)

Becoming a first-time parent can feel like stepping into an ill-fitting pair of shoes. It’s hard to imagine our personal consciousness—so localized and particular and private—attaching itself to such a timeless and universal identity. How could we, with our complicated interior spaces, our irreducible and unique private lives, assume such an archetypal role?

But if becoming a parent feels like taking on an alien role, it may feel even more so when one enters parenthood as half of an LGBT couple.

When Amie Miller and her partner, Jane, decided to have a child, one of the most daunting challenges they faced was a lack of models.

“You really are walking into it blind for the first time,” Amie says. “It’s true that there are a lot of gay and lesbian parents now. But it’s not the norm. On some level, it felt like we really are creating this path. The dominant model is very dominant.”

Amie chronicled her experiences as a first-time mother in her book, She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood. As the subtitle suggests, much of the memoir is devoted to exploring this relatively new and ill-defined identity: the nonbiological lesbian mom.

The book originated as a private journal. It opens with the discovery that Jane has become pregnant after her first attempt. Amie’s own efforts to become pregnant had ended in repeated frustration.

In the first chapter, Amie walks us through the daunting set of choices facing aspiring lesbian mothers, nicely capturing the hypermedicalized language that permeates prospective motherhood.

In her own efforts to discover the magic formula for conception, Amie lets herself be guided by a mixture of science and hocus-pocus. She chooses to be inseminated by a medical student’s sperm, hoping that the sperm “might have some special insider knowledge about how to penetrate an egg.”

One of the memoir’s most enjoyable qualities is this faithfulness in recording the eccentric perceptions and feelings that make up this very personal experience. Amie captures the unbidden, aimless, flitting thoughts that constitute consciousness, the disorganized stream of mini-impressions that, in the memoir, occasionally coalesce into metaphor.

The writing is crisp, funny, and candid. Amie declares that she feels like a “dad in drag.”

“In the world of moms, I still feel like I’m passing,” she explains. “I am using Mommy English as a second language, always trying to think about what clause comes next and trying to remember my idioms. It’s a real bucket of monkeys.”

The memoir stays true to its roots as a personal journal. As a narrator, Amie is content to meander and dawdle and digress, to elaborate on an impression or insight before driving home an overarching theme. The writing vacillates between structure and nonstructure.

This looseness of form allows Amie to sprinkle the narrative with sociological asides. She insightfully links dominant or stereotypical strands of gay culture to the assumption that LGBT couples will never have children. 

“Historically, the gay community has compensated for its lack of procreation by more or less ignoring children. We have been defined by our sexuality and often play to type, building a culture—with all its camp and art, its politics and pathos—that emphasizes sex. Only recently has the focus begun to shift to marriage and, for a subset of the community, to kids.”

But this mixture of structure and lack thereof also allows Amie to replay, for the reader, the very process of enfolding raw personal experience into a story. We recognize ourselves in both the fragmentary nature of the material, and in the storytelling impulse that organizes these fragments into a form.

By rendering her personal experience so that it remains recognizable to her readers, Amie bridges the gap between the readers’ own private lives and her own life as a nonbiological lesbian mom.

The memoir conveys the strangeness of becoming a parent, of taking on a role that has only ever been experienced from the outside. It’s a strangeness that is enhanced by Amie’s sexual orientation, which increases the otherness of the parental role-model figure.

Amie’s own experience as a nonbiological lesbian mother is certainly different from the experience of her partner. But in the memoir, nonbiological motherhood possesses a richness of its own. Motherhood descends on Amie suddenly, without the usual biological foreshadowing. The sudden, surging emotions of motherhood become, in some ways, more vibrant against the neutral backdrop of biological normalcy, untouched by the transforming experience of pregnancy.

Ultimately, the book shines through as a celebration of parenting. If anything, Amie’s status as a nonbiological parent makes her a more effective interpreter of motherhood. Motherhood strikes Amie like lightning, and in the sudden flash, the contours of new experience appear starkly vivid. Amie delivers a fresh perspective on motherhood, less defined by biology but no less transfused with wonder, reverence, and awe.

She Looks Just Like You was published by Beacon Press in 2010.