What To Expect When You Are Expecting

What To Expect When You Are Expecting is a pregnancy guide book. Published in 1984 for the first time, this guide became the must-read guide for pregnant women worldwide. And if you are wondering how it has garnered such huge success, the answer is probably because it’s written in the most simple way. Until its release, most of the books that you could read regarding pregnancy had a strict format — following the guideline of a medical book; more educative, less reader-friendly. What To Expect When You Are Expecting is based on a question and answer technique; a very straight forward one that really helps the reader comprehend what she is experiencing.

I have never read it throughout, there hasn’t been the need to do so, but I have browsed it several times on many occasions. I really enjoyed the way it’s been written; it’s simple and efficient while it took me by surprise with the range of questions that it answers. It mentions things that take a great deal of courage to put out there. In a way it’s one of the most liberating books that I have ever seen, purely because it manages not only to glorify the significance of a pregnancy but also to demystify that every woman has to be happy while being pregnant. Expecting is definitely challenging considering the major transformations that a woman’s body has to suffer and just like everything else everyone is experiencing it differently — that was the second main thing that this guide wanted to demonstrate. It is perfectly normal if you feel edgy, nervous, and miserable or you are a total mess, things like that can happen and it’s going to be just fine.

Besides its huge success and its international recognition, I never thought that it would be the kind of book that someone would consider adapting. Basically, because of two reasons: first, its limited audience would make marketing incredibly difficult. And second, everything that made this guide special has already been said and shown. We have already seen the funny, the sad and the humoristic side of a pregnant woman or the struggle to get pregnant. That’s why I was intrigued by this adaptation — I considered it a challenging one.

As there are no characters in the book and only cases, it made total sense to make it like a jigsaw. A group of famous actors divided in pairs. Of course they are all connected somehow (or cross paths) and while we are watching, each one has his and her own story to tell. With quite a promising cast, including Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks, Chase Crawford, Matthew Morrison and many more; What to Expect When You Are Expecting ends up to being a strangely mediocre film, for the very same reasons that I thought that this would be a difficult adaptation. It was one of those things that seemed to be a better idea in theory than in practice.