Aileen Weintraub gets 'Knocked Down' But She Gets Up Again!

In Knocked Down, award-winning author, Aileen Weintraub, enthralls readers with her hilarious, yet touching, memoir detailing her childhood through to her difficult pregnancy. “So Knocked Down is my story about being a Brooklyn girl who moves to the country, ends up having this whirlwind romance, and ends up on bed rest in a rickety old farmhouse for five months because of unusually large fibroids, and as the farmhouse begins to collapse around me because it’s old and it’s in need of repair, my marriage also starts to fall apart and all of this is going on while I’m on bed rest and it’s where I finally begin to come to terms with my father’s death and the grief I’ve been holding for him and not processing and this is happening while I’m trying to fight for the survival of my unborn child.”

During the interview, Caroline remarked on the great detail that was included in the memoir. Weintraub explained, “…I had kept some journals and you know when you’re on bed rest for five months, there’s not much going on, right? You have a lot of time to think and process and write things down and so when I started writing that first draft, it wasn’t fifteen years ago, it was, you know, it had been five years before, and so I was able to remember a lot of that.” One of the challenges for authors when writing memoirs is having to take private, sometimes painful, moments and presenting them out to the world in a way that is respectful to those involved. For her, she said, “This is so difficult and I really had to think about what my story was going to do to other people and how they were going to feel about it…you know, I gave it a lot of thought and what I decided is when I wrote a scene I said, ‘Is this necessary for the arc of the story? Did this give this story forward momentum? Can I leave it out?’…If I could leave out a painful scene, then I left it out because my intention is not to hurt anybody, it’s to tell a story.” In the end, she was able to leave out many parts she felt were not completely necessary while still being able to get her point across and tell her story authentically.

Since the release of her book, Weintraub has received positive feedback and made personal connections with many of her readers. She added that one of the reasons she wrote this book was to help release her trauma and connect with women so they could feel comfortable also releasing their trauma. She recalled a time recently in which she had come across an old acquaintance who confided in her and shared their own harrowing life experience and from that conversation, Weintraub felt, “This is what it’s about…right here…that was such a beautiful moment and so I felt like I had accomplished something with this book in that moment.”