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lightreadsThe Art of Waiting
4/5. Infertility memoirs are like war memoirs: highly personal, with a bent towards the philosophical when they’re good, tending to be a bit nonlinear in the way memories are when they are formed under traumatic circumstances. It’s just that war memoirs are written by men and win prestigious prizes, and infertility memoirs are written by women and get shelved, inexplicably and it turns out wildly inaccurately, in the “health/diet” section of my electronic library (why?).
This is a pretty good one. It’s frank about the things that don’t get talked about except on infertility blogs, like just how much five years of trying cost, and what the insurance covered and what it wouldn’t. It’s also the sort of book that a thoughtful, writerly person would write after five years of trying and failing and regrouping and trying to move on and starting the adoption process and coming back to try again. So it’s very personal to her, but she also turned her thoughts to other people who came at the same problem from different places, like a gay male couple, and, most painfully, one of the still-living victims of North Carolina’s eugenics sterilization program. The one thing this book is not about, weirdly, is her marriage. I happen to know for a fuckin’ fact that going down this road when it’s long and hard will change your relationship, no question. So it’s an odd omission at the center of this story.
But that’s okay. It’s her war memoir. She gets to tell the parts she wants and keep back the parts she doesn’t.
P.s. They did ultimately get pregnant, if that’s something you need to know before reading.
4/5. Infertility memoirs are like war memoirs: highly personal, with a bent towards the philosophical when they’re good, tending to be a bit nonlinear in the way memories are when they are formed under traumatic circumstances. It’s just that war memoirs are written by men and win prestigious prizes, and infertility memoirs are written by women and get shelved, inexplicably and it turns out wildly inaccurately, in the “health/diet” section of my electronic library (why?).
This is a pretty good one. It’s frank about the things that don’t get talked about except on infertility blogs, like just how much five years of trying cost, and what the insurance covered and what it wouldn’t. It’s also the sort of book that a thoughtful, writerly person would write after five years of trying and failing and regrouping and trying to move on and starting the adoption process and coming back to try again. So it’s very personal to her, but she also turned her thoughts to other people who came at the same problem from different places, like a gay male couple, and, most painfully, one of the still-living victims of North Carolina’s eugenics sterilization program. The one thing this book is not about, weirdly, is her marriage. I happen to know for a fuckin’ fact that going down this road when it’s long and hard will change your relationship, no question. So it’s an odd omission at the center of this story.
But that’s okay. It’s her war memoir. She gets to tell the parts she wants and keep back the parts she doesn’t.
P.s. They did ultimately get pregnant, if that’s something you need to know before reading.