Creating the project was an interesting experience in of itself. First I researched the drug itself, seeing things from the scientific perspective, then I looked at effects on the children born to this disease. I thought about what it would be like to be in the place of a woman born in a culture that was extremely involved with the typical “family” and the “American dream.” The ideal image of the perfect housewife and mother. I felt that the main character, Layla, would most likely look up to her mother. I likened the feeling of being an expectant mother to my own expectations of the future and the feeling of having one’s expectations not come true. To do this, I used Foer’s use of letters, Morrison’s use of sensory experience and the interface from Pynchon. I felt that letters and journals are personal, we write them because we want some sort of relief of our emotions, happy or sad. A sensory experience is something that we can all relate to and therefore would enhance the narrative. Similarly, an interface helps the reader to understand a situation in a different context.
In order to complete this project, I had to put myself in the same situation as the character. The question that I kept in mind was: How would I have felt? I also used my own experience from when my mother was pregnant and when my sister was born. I mixed aspects of science and feeling to create a narrative. I also wanted to keep things relative to the time period and culture. It seems that every decade is wrought with its own moral conventions and in order to write something that dealt with a different time period, you have to think in that time period. I felt that in order to show the deepest effect, I would have to write about a woman who as traditional as possible.
I used quite a bit of multimedia in the project, many of which were not directly related to the narrative. These were my interface. Rather than tell the reader of Layla’s pregnancy growth, I posted a time lapse video of a plant growing. To establish the mood, I chose songs that I felt were contemplative. The task of expressing a lived experience is a difficult one. It requires taking every part of that experience: person directly experiencing it, people around them, society, science, belief, feeling. By taking all these aspects, one can cover the experience in more than just the subjective sense.
