An Empty Lap: One Couple's Journey to Parenthood

This harrowing but ultimately joyous book chronicles one couple's struggle with a string of decisions that will be familiar to many readers: whether to marry, whether to have children, how to deal with infertility, whether to adopt. Smolowe, a freelance journalist, tells her story with a combination of wit, raw emotion and skill. Once married, she and Joe Treen, chief of correspondents at People and 13 years her senior, decided, with mixed feelings, to have children. The author's determination evolved into obsession even as her husband's misgivings deepened. She recreates her near dissolution in grief and anger when she learned that she was unable to conceive, and she describes with sympathy her husband's ambivalence toward parenthood as they pursued fertility treatments. After years of tortuous negotiation, a near divorce and much anguish, the couple finally adopted a baby girl in China, whom they named Becky, in a denouement that would have been saccharine-sweet in the hands of a less skilled writer. Instead, the story's resolution feels natural and satisfying. The book suffers somewhat from the absence of the husband's perspective; but the insight the author brings to bear on the couple's mutual journey has a powerful effect. (Nov.)