Everything was going right in the delivery room until, suddenly, it wasn't. The baby's brain was damaged; the new mother was unprepared for the life she and her family would now be living. In dense, lyrical prose, Jody Gelb pays tribute to her daughter's short life. She May Be Lying Down but She May Be Very Happy is a marvel of compression and potency. Gelb lays her experience bare in the full range of its emotional complexity, from profound suffering to ecstatic joy. It is a mother-daughter memoir scrubbed of sentiment. She May Be Lying Down but She May Be Very Happy isn't so much a book as the naked truth of being human in this imperfect world.

Jody Gelb is an actor and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area best known for her roles on Broadway in the Tony Award–winning plays Titanic, The Who’s Tommy, and Wicked, in which she also toured nationally, as well as television appearances on Law & Order and Dr. Death.