MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
It offers advice on everything from indigestion to post-partum depression, and it is a detailed guide to every moment of pregnancy, perhaps too detailed, as NPR's Lynn Neary tells us.
LYNN NEARY: Unidentified Woman #1: Oh, this so sweet.
NEARY: For many years now, a standard baby shower gift has been a copy of "What to Expect When You're Expecting." But when Dawn Baker didn't get the book at her shower last month, she wasn't disappointed.
DAWN BAKER: I've actually been told that it's not necessarily a go-to resource anymore these days for modern-day women.
NEARY: Young women these days may not need a book to get answers to their questions about pregnancy. After all, they have the internet for that. Even so, the fourth edition of "What to Expect" still sits at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and it's been there for more than 500 weeks.
SUZANNE RAFER: I think one of the smartest things I've ever said was this is a really good proposal. I think we should do this book.
NEARY: Suzanne Rafer of Workman Publishing has been editor of "What to Expect" since the very beginning.
RAFER: The proposal just was smartly written, the idea of taking a woman through a pregnancy one month at time.
NEARY: The woman who wrote that proposal was Heidi Murkoff. Two hours after dropping it off at the publishers, she went into labor with her first child. She says she had no idea what to expect when she got pregnant and so went searching for answers to her own questions.
HEIDI MURKOFF: I don't know, there might have been five books on the market back then. And I found that they didn't answer my questions. They didn't offer me the reassurance that I was craving.
NEARY: Before writing the book, Murkoff circulated questionnaires in doctors' offices to find out what pregnant women were worrying about.
MURKOFF: The theme is always - is it normal? And it might be is it normal for my palms to turn red, is it normal that my mouth tastes like I've been sucking on a penny? You know, it's that metallic mouth. But then again, you know, is it normal that I haven't felt the baby kick yet? Is it normal that I felt the baby kick last week but not this week? And the list goes on and on.
NEARY: Unidentified Woman #2: So go ahead and just take a comfortable seat. Wherever babies are is a great place for them to be.
NEARY: Ariadne Stanciole had just moved to this country when she became pregnant with her now-six-month-old daughter Sabine.
ARIADNE STANCIOLE: And I had no friends, no one, no family. So I said I will buy this book. I saw in so many movies, must be the bible in the United States. So that's how I bought it.
NEARY: Stanciole says she used the book as an encyclopedia and a dictionary for English terms she didn't understand. But Angie Hoffman, mother of eight-week- old Dean, says she couldn't finish it.
ANGIE HOFFMAN: It scared me to death and I said, all these awful things are going to happen to me, I can't read this any further. So I put it down until my nine-week appointment, and then I picked it up again, and I was like, I have to put this down again, it's scaring me again.
NEARY: Hoffman says she was put off by the worst-case scenarios in the book. But Melissa Saura, who is due in a couple of weeks, says she found the book helpful as long as she took it in small doses.
MELISSA SAURA: I didn't want to know too much because I didn't want to scare myself. So you know, with the first month, I read the first month and with the second month I read the second month. And I've been doing that all along. I haven't read too much further ahead.
NEARY: Jill Keane, mother of four-month-old Siobhan, says reading the book all at once is a mistake.
JILL KEANE: I had a friend who warned me, who said, be careful not to read the book from cover to cover as if it's a novel. Otherwise you will be looking for certain things to happen to yourself. And really, do not miss your own experience.
NEARY: But Murkoff argues there really is no such thing as too much information when it comes to pregnancy.
MURKOFF: I would say there is - I'm about to coin something different - but TMM, which is too much misinformation and conflicting information and confusing information. So, the important thing is to get the correct information.
NEARY: Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
Copyright © 2011 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.