I read with interest the story of gestational surrogacy Her Body, My Baby by Alex Kuczynski in the Nov. 30 Sunday Magazine of The New York Times.
Two reasons I was intrigued:
- I interviewed Kucynski by phone for a Manhattan Media story that I wrote in early 2007 (posted below). She had won an Our Town award for her witty contributions to the “The Critical Shopper” column in The New York Times. Reading Kucznski’s columns was great fun - some were so snarky they made me laugh aloud.
- I want to write a story about a military wife who becomes a surrogate while her husband is deployed. I was in contact with a woman who planned to be a surrogate, but she became pregnant (by her husband) before he left for Afghanistan.
I’m still looking for a good source!
Kucznski has taken heat for her NYT story - many negative blog comments about it, especially the accompanying photographs, which Kuczynski is reported not to have liked. In the photos, Kuczynski looks sleek, toned and wealthy. Hillings, the surrogate mother, looks poor and ungainly, heavily burdened by the pregnancy.
The few of Hillings’s words and actions contained in the story reveal her to be exceptionally thoughtful about the strong emotions surrounding surrogacy. In her application, she referred to herself as a “foster mother” of the baby until it was born. Hillings gave Kuczynski a birthday present and brought a gift to the hospital for Kucznski at the time of the baby’s delivery. Hillings comes off as very sensitive.
In contrast, Kuczynski searched literature for how to behave. She seemed to struggle with the delicacy of the surrogacy relationship and unable to respond from the heart to Hillings.
In fact, Charles Hoyt, public editor for NYT, was forced to acknowledge last Sunday that the cumulative effect of the story and photos struck readers as elitist and that the story had not given sufficient space to Hillings’s feelings.
Our Town, Manhattan Media, 01/25/2007
Sharp Eye, Witty Pen: Alex Kucynski Mulls More Than Retail
Culture is the study of perfection, wrote the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold.
Alex Kuczynski, author and New York Times columnist, writes about modern-day culture with wit, research, and self-revelation. Kuczynski seeks out the ultimate shopping experience in her Critical Shopper column and examines the quest for the ideal body in her recently published book, “Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery.”
In her column, Kuczynski, 39, dissects shopping not only at expensive and upscale Barney’s, Henri Bendel, and the bygone B. Altman, but also at the more affordable Target, Loehmann’s and Century 21. She would like the rest of us to think about shopping more critically, too, but it’s hard to imagine doing so with her keen and barbed sense of humor.
Kuczynski liked Gap’s new stores — called Forth & Towne and targeted at women over age 35 — although she was also inspired to riff on getting old and ponder the definition of maturity.
She said she’s received the greatest reader response for her column, “Confidential to You: Your Bra Does Not Fit” that described her shopping trip to the Town Shop, an Upper West Side lingerie store. She liked the Town Shop, and many readers heeded her advice to head there for an expert fitting. “I even received a note from Sandra Day O’Connor,” Kuczynski said.
Kuczynski’s book, “Beauty Junkies” takes aim at the American obsession with body image and details her own cosmetic surgery experiences, which include Botox injections, collagen treatments, liposuction, eyelid surgery, and Restylane lip plumping. Although many reviews have focused on Kuczynski’s own cosmetic enhancements, she believes they mischaracterize her book. “Only 10 percent of my book is about me,” she said, “the other 90 percent is a sociocultural history of body modification.”
Writing a book was on Kuczynski’s list of things that terrified her to do (and therefore she must do, she said), although writing seems to be in her genes. Her father, the economist Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski is the former prime minister of Peru and has written several books on the economics of Latin America.
Kuczynski was born in Peru and lived there until her family moved to the United States when she was 10. Kuczynski’s mother, Jane Casey Hughes, was a reporter for the Voice of American in Washington, D.C.
A graduate of Barnard College, Kuczynski experimented with comedy improv when she was an undergraduate, sharpening the timing and sense of humor that she wields in her conversation and columns. After college, she worked in book publishing until she became a reporter, initially for “The New York Observer,” before moving to “The New York Times” 10 years ago. She has also written for magazines and National Public Radio. Kuczynski said that she will probably write another book in the future and has several ideas under consideration.
In the meantime, Kuczynski, who married the investor Charles Porter Stevenson, Jr., 57, in 2005, is trying to have a baby, writing her columns, studying Japanese and Russian, and learning to play the piano — while mulling over a possible future attempt to swim the English Channel.
