Books

I Cannot Control Everything Forever

I Cannot Control Everything Forever is a memoir about navigating the gap between expectation and reality in modern motherhood. Its braided narratives explore a complicated path to becoming a mother, offering background on the science and technology of maternity, and drawing upon a range of works of art to explore the choices and uncertainties that parents are faced with today.

The book centers around a personal narrative involving several complicated pregnancies and the experience of raising a child with multiple disabilities. From there, it expands outwards to address fundamental questions about the promises scientific advancements offer – the alluring potential that, if we properly regulate our bodies and our environments, we can expect to have successful pregnancies and healthy, able-bodied children—and what happens when those expectations fail us.

Advance praise for I Cannot Control Everything Forever

“Emily Bloom draws on history, literature, and personal experience of what she calls ‘adjacency to disability’—first as a sister, then as a mother—in her exploration of how modern technology intervenes in the ancient arts of mothering and care work. I was very moved by this book.”
—Jessica Winter, author of The Fourth Child

“A poignant, luminous, and exquisitely crafted debut memoir. With honesty, wit, stunning prose, and a formidable intelligence, Bloom delivers profound insights into modern parenthood, illuminating its complexities through meditations on science, technology, and art. This is required reading for anyone seeking to better understand the way love generates deep and interconnected truths. It was an honor to read Emily’s work.”
—Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty

“A compelling memoir of the early years of parenthood, of dealing with doctors, of dealing with bodies and illnesses, and of trying to make sense of these experiences by 'reading' them through science and art. There is so much care and intelligence on every page. Most of all, at the end of each day as I put my own life aside, I wanted nothing more than to pick this book up and connect to Bloom's through her beautiful, lucid, wise writing.”
—Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self

“Compelling, moving, and insightful. Bloom explores the frustrations of contemporary parenting in ways that will be instantly recognizable, as she writes with compassion and curiosity about pregnancy and mothering at the intersection of technology and love.”
—Julie Phillips, author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

“A big-hearted, wise, and beautifully written account of longing for and diving into motherhood, of parenting a child with unexpected challenges, and the technologies that sustain and complicate our lives. I wanted to read on to know what happened next and I did not want it to end.”
—Rachel Adams, author of Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery

“From the tangled roots of the pregnancy test and abortion to the always on of glucose monitors and hearing aids, Emily Bloom helps us re-see the contemporary rituals and rules of mothering through and among its technologies. This brilliant memoir of parenting and disability (and art and literature) is an essential book.”
—Hannah Zeavin, author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy

“Emily Bloom’s enthralling memoir takes readers on a journey, at times fraught, at times joyous, as she embraces the unpredictability of pregnancy and parenthood.”
—Randi Epstein, author of Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything

Book cover of The Wireless Past, colorful triangles on white background.

The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968

Winner of the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford, 2016) chronicles the emergence of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a significant promotional platform and aesthetic influence for Irish modernism from the 1930s to the 1960s.

This is the first book-length study of Irish literary broadcasting on the BBC and situates the works of W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and Samuel Beckett in the context of the media environments that shaped their works. Drawing upon unpublished radio archives, this book shows that radio broadcasting, rather than prompting a break with literary history, served as an important means for reinterpreting the legacies of oral and print traditions.

A “much-needed perspective in radio studies” that “will help reshape the ways we view the interconnected and symbiotic relationship between modernism and radio broadcasting” - The Space Between

“Bloom explores the paradoxes of Irish radio modernism in a way that is accessible, insightful, and highly readable.” - The Irish Times