it was a marketing/advertising team’s plan to cash in on a baby boom, and it was postwar so a very high rate of sedative use was going on, especially among women. People say it was for morning sickness, but in the U.S. Thalidomide is a sedative, but it was marketed in the 50s and 60s to pregnant women for insomnia.

It’s based on a documentary about thalidomide in England in the 60s called Attacking the Devil. The Weinsteins are releasing a film with Carey Mulligan later this year about the London Times reporters’ coverage of the drug that caused 10,000 babies to be born worldwide with major birth defects.

Younger people do not know what thalidomide is, but within the next year they will have heard all about it. What do you think this audience would find most interesting about your work?įor starters, I’d like them to know that thalidomide absolutely DID happen here in the United States.

Points is a blog primarily for drug and alcohol historians. I write about Catholics, sort of like Alice McDermott but with a bit more of an edge. Instead I tell them what I have in common with them. But I don’t ask about that, nor do I tell them that I have written about a nun who looked like a penguin when she ran. I can’t help but to notice the resemblance between these folks at the bar. When they ask you what you write about, how do you answer? Two nuns and a penguin approach you at a bar, and you tell them you’re a writer. Cronin serves as an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine and lives in Los Angeles. Her nonfiction has earned her a Pushcart Prize nomination, and her two novels were finalists for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Award for Novels-in-Progress. ” In 2008, Cronin won the Washington Writing Prize for Short Fiction. Mermaid appeared on O, The Oprah Magazine ‘s Best Memoirs of 2014 list and Pop Sugar ‘s “Must Reads of 2014. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Third Coast, and Best American Essays, among other venues. In addition to nonfiction, Cronin writes poetry and fiction. Her book Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (2014) centers on her search for the truth about her body and the role that the drug thalidomide played in its shape, her childhood in a large Catholic family, her mother’s mental illness, her marriage, and her own struggles with alcohol. Eileen Cronin is a writer and clinical psychologist.

Mermaid a memoir of resilience