Everything was going right in the delivery room until, suddenly, it wasn’t. The baby’s brain was damaged; the new mother, unprepared for the life she and her family would now be living.

In dense, lyrical prose, Jody Gelb pays tribute to her daughter’s short life. She May Be lying Down but She May Be Very Happy is a marvel of compression and potency. Gelb lays her experience bare in the full range of its emotional complexity, from profound suffering to ecstatic joy. It is a mother-daughter memoir scrubbed of sentiment. She May Be lying Down but She May Be Very Happy isn’t so much a book as the naked truth of being human in this imperfect world.