No One Talks About This Stuff: Twenty-Two Stories of Almost Parenthood

These intimate personal reflections, collected by journalist Brown (It’s Not a Bloody Trend), probe the complicated emotions that follow miscarriages, terminated pregnancies, and learning one can’t have a biological child. Jody Day recounts struggling to conceive despite having no discernible medical impediment and feeling like “a failed woman” until her mid-40s, when she started a blog about the experience, around which coalesced a supportive community of women who were “childless-by-circumstance.” Other entries explore the reasons women choose to end a pregnancy, with Hilary Freeman offering a plaintive account of deciding not to carry her baby to term after discovering it had a rare genetic condition that would have made its life short and painful. Elsewhere, Miranda Ward meditates on maintaining her “capacity for hope” after four miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, and Rageshri Dhairyawan recalls burying herself in her work to distract herself from the grief she felt after learning she wouldn’t be able to conceive by IVF. The heartrending stories capture the sorrow and despair that accompany unsuccessful attempts to have children, even as they illuminate the many roads to acceptance after pain. Readers will want to keep tissues at the ready. (July)