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Hi! I'm Molly. I love history, arts, theatre, and, you guessed it, books! My goal is to share good books. Learn more about me here.

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EGG FREEZING

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS

Motherhood, Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It by Sarah Elizabeth Richards. Read an excerpt.

Published by Simon & Schuster, 2015

Had egg freezing been unfairly scrutinized? Frankly, it’s hard to say because egg freezing is different from any other fertility treatment. For one, many doctors don’t like offering it. The concept of performing a surgical intervention on healthy women as a hedge against future infertility runs counter to doctors’ “First do no harm” mandate. (Women who show signs of early menopause might be seen as exceptions, but certainly not thirty-six-year-old women who only “illness” is that they will someday get old.)

In Her Own Sweet Time: Egg Freezing and the New Frontiers of Family by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt. Read an excerpt.

Published by Nothing But The Truth Publishing, 2016

It seems to me this process is one of the great ironies of the modern age: Women spend their fertile years finding themselves, getting educated, building their careers, and postponing pregnancy to make money, and then, having run out the clock on their own fertility, they have to spend that money to buy a younger woman’s eggs

INFERTILITY/IVF

SOCIAL SCIENCE

Eggs Unscrambled: Egg Freezing, Fertility, and the Truth About Your Reproductive Years by Agnes Fischer. Read an excerpt.

Published by Regan Arts, 2017

Kate told me something similar. “It irritates the hell out of me when people say in the popular discourse, in a magazine that’s progressive and right-on in other respects, that women ‘wait too long.’ It’s sloppy language. It’s as if we’re literally waiting. Like there aren’t a million other things in our lives! I don’t feel like I waited, I feel like I was trying to make it happen, but various factors not fully in my control determined the outcome. That wasn’t me waiting. It’s as though people think that if we simply put our minds to it we could make a baby happen, and that’s just false.” Hear, hear.

The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant without Losing Your Mind by Amy Klein. Read an excerpt.

Published by Ballantine Books, 2020

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. That’s what we’ve been taught to expect. But life doesn’t always turn out the way we hoped. Sometimes we get what we want but not how we want it. Let’s face it, no one ever says, “I dream of having my eggs extracted and mixed with my husband’s sperm in a test tube to create a baby.”

Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology by Jenni Quilter. Read an excerpt.

Published by Riverhead Books, 2022

I knew, consciously, that my own baby desire was far slighter than that of other women I knew, but I had also unconsciously accepted that giving birth would act as a fulcrum, a kind of tipping point. This was not so much about wanting a baby as expecting a life shaped by one. What would my life look like without the central event around which everything else gained interpretative symmetry? No wonder I was bereft. Without realizing it, I had considered motherhood as a kind of automatic meaning-making machine. Now I was exhausted by the prospect that I would have to craft this meaning on terms that would not be immediately or easily understood by people around me.

Missed Conceptions: How We Make Sense of Infertility by Karen Stollznow. Read an excerpt.

Published by Broadleaf Books, 2023

His conception and birth were a miracle to us, but also not so miraculous: the process involved a lot of hard work.

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS

Having Your First Baby After Thirty: A Personal Journey from Infertility to Childbirth by Elizabeth Fuller.

Published by Dodd Mead, 1983

Our Miracle Called Louise: A Parents’ Story by Lesley & John Brown with Sue Freeman. Read an excerpt.

Published by Grosset & Dunlap, 1984

If the neighbours heard, they might let the newspapers know. I could imagine the headlines: “Test Tube Baby Screams All Night.” Having a miracle was a lot to live up to. It felt as if the whole world expected me to be a perfect mother.

Wanting a Child: Twenty-Two Writers on their Difficult But Mostly Successful Quests for Parenthood in a High-Tech Age Edited by and with an introduction by Jill Bialosky and Helen Schulman. Read an excerpt.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

The sorrow I felt when I confronted the possibility of never having a baby forced me to acknowledge how desperately I wanted one. There’s great vulnerability in desperation. How much safer you are if there isn’t anything you want too badly. [In Vitro by Agnes Rossi]

Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother by Peggy Orenstein. Read an excerpt.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, 2007

I thought back to the weightlessness I’d felt at the Oscars, the easy love between us in those days. Being together used to be more than enough for me – it was everything. When had that changed? In weighing all the risks of fertility treatments, I had willfully ignored the risks to our relationship.

The Baby Void: My Quest for Motherhood by Judith Uyterlinde; English Translation by Marion Boers. Read an excerpt.

Published by Skirt!, 2008

This time I won’t have a worry-free pregnancy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t at least be glad that I am pregnant. I won’t buy any baby clothes this time, nor think about names, nor fantasize about what the child might look like and what it will feel like to hold it in my arms. I will be expecting without expecting anything. It sounds like an impossible contradiction.

So Close: Infertile and Addicted to Hope by Tertia Albertyn. Read an excerpt.

Published by Porcupine Press trading under DGR Writing & Research, 2009

She says, ‘But the new Tertia is everything the old Tertia was, just with so much more. It’s the old Tertia – better, wiser, softer, kinder.’ This is a big moment for me. For the first time I realise that all that has happened to me need not make me less – it can make me more – if I choose it to.

Single Infertile Female: Adventures in Love, Life, and Infertility by Leah Campbell.

Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Breeding in Captivity: One Woman’s Unusual Path to Motherhood by Stacy Bolt. Read an excerpt.

Published by Skirt!, 2013

My favorite was CO/DP, which stands for Cautious Optimism / Defensive Pessimism. This term perfectly described the near-constant tug-of-war that was going on inside my brain as I made my way through each month. It goes a little something like this: You want to be positive. You really do. You want to believe that this cycle, this drug, this procedure will be the one that works. Because if you don’t have any hope, then why do it? So you have to be optimistic. But not too optimistic. Because getting your hopes up only to have them smashed back down again? Well, you have to protect yourself. You have to grow armor. So you tell yourself that even though you hope that this cycle, this drug, this procedure is the one that works, you know deep down inside that it probably won’t. So you don’t get your hopes up. Not too much. Maybe just a little.

The Pursuit of Motherhood by Jessica Hepburn. Read an excerpt.

Published by Troubador Publishing, 2013

I always thought that as long as my story had a happy ending then I would be able to accept, maybe even appreciate, everything I’ve been through. I have kept writing in the hope that it would happen; that this would eventually become a book of triumph over adversity, like so many of the best life stories are. But it seems that for now, at least, it isn’t.

21 Miles: Swimming in Search of the Meaning of Motherhood by Jessica Hepburn. Read an excerpt.

Published by Unbound, 2019

It’s actually irrelevant whether or not she is a mother, because Fiona Shackleton is mothering. She embodies the verb as much as she embodies the noun. It makes me wonder whether, if I can’t be noun, I can be verb instead.

Motherhoodwinked: An Infertility Memoir by Anne-Marie Scully. Read an excerpt.

Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

I felt completed hoodwinked. I had gone from being a paranoid young girl, convinced that I could get pregnant even when having protected sex, to being a married woman, desperate for a baby and frustrated to learn that the window of opportunity is shockingly small.

In Due Time: A Journey Through Infertility, Loss, and Embracing the Unknown by Jen Noonan. Read an excerpt.

Published by Mission Bay Press, 2015

I learned that we all have our dreams, and when they aren’t fulfilled, we have a right to grieve, no matter what the dream is.

The Doctor and the Stork: A Memoir of Modern Medical Babymaking by K.K. Goldberg. Read an excerpt.

Published by She Writes Press, 2015

“No problem,” I lied, as if I’d been waiting patiently, which was maybe why they called you a “patient” – wishfully, as a suggestion.

The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood by Belle Boggs. Read an excerpt.

Published by Graywolf Press, 2016

“I don’t feel like myself,” I remember telling Richard. More accurately, I felt split in two. The person I had hoped to become was torn away, leaving only the person I had always been.

The Underachieving Ovary: Will There Be Light at the End of the Birth Canal? by J T Lawrence. Read an excerpt.

Published by Pulp Books, 2016

Normal grief, like you would experience after loving someone, usually follows a linear process. But in the midst of trying to conceive while infertile, you’re not allowed the chance to heal and move on. Instead, you have ravenclaws: you’re stuck in a grief cycle like a hamster on a wheel, like the spinning beachball of death, with no end in sight, and this can become overwhelming.

336 Hours by Rachel Cathan. Read an excerpt.

Published by Silverwood Books, 2017

And I had to refrain from telling her that I feel exactly the same as she does. After all, I’ve sacrificed my career, social life and personal ambitions for my children as well. But, unlike Nat, I just haven’t fucking well met mine yet.

Of This Much I’m Sure: A Memoir by Nadine Kenney Johnstone. Read an excerpt.

Published by She Writes Press, 2017

How could the yearning for something she’d never had be greater than the love of the partner she already had?

Dare to Dream: My Struggle to Become a Mum – A Story of Heartache and Hope by Izzy Judd. Read an excerpt.

Published by Bantam Press, 2017

There are so many ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’, but we would send ourselves mad if we thought too hard about them.

Finding Inner Peas: My Sometimes-Hilarious Story of Infertility, High-Risk Pregnancy, and Finding Out That I Control Absolutely Nothing by Erin Salem. Read an excerpt.

Published by BalboaPress, 2018

A swift, quick, straight-out-of-the-movie-Alien sensation. That had to have been my baby boy’s foot. It felt exactly the way I thought it would feel and still nothing like anything I’d felt before.

Infreakinfertility: How to Survive When Getting Pregnant Gets Hard by Melanie Dale. Read an excerpt.

Published by Bowker, 2018

What was supposed to be a fun romp between two people in love felt more like shooting a sex scene in a movie, with rote choreography and a ton of people in the room giving you direction

Warrior: Battling infertility – Staying Sane While Trying to Conceive by Tori Day. Read an excerpt.

Published by Tori Day, 2019

I know people talk about having a baby ruining your sex life, but it turns out trying for a baby can do that all by itself.

Conceivability: What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility by Elizabeth Katkin; Afterword by Dr. Joel Batzofin. Read an excerpt.

Published by Simon & Schuster, 2019

Patients who start down the path of fertility treatments describe it as being stuck on a treadmill that they cannot get off; as feeling like they’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and can’t get out; as an addiction, as potent as cigarettes or alcohol. They just can’t stop trying. I know. I felt that way. As did Paula, and Jessica, and almost every woman with whom I spoke, particularly those who repeatedly miscarried.

The Underwear in My Shoe: My Journey Through IVF, Unfiltered by Brett Russo. Read an excerpt.

Published by Houndstooth Press, 2020

I was feeling more and more alone as I traveled further into this journey. People were starting to lose patience with my suffering, moving on with their own lives. I get it. It wasn’t their issue. They had their own problems. But their turning away was still hard to bear. I never had a problem that lasted this long – one that took so much time and forbearance. They were moving on, and I was still stuck in place – more alone than ever.

I Hear Some People Just Have Sex: An Infertility Memoir with an Ambiguous Ending by Sandra L. Vasher. Read an excerpt.

Published by Mortal Ink Press, LLC, 2020

Parents love to say that “having children changes everything,” and they say this as both a complaint and a sort of badge of honor. You know what? Not being able to have children also changes everything, and no, those childless years aren’t necessarily a dream for someone struggling with infertility.

Fighting Infertility: Finding My Inner Warrior Through Trying to Conceive, IVF, and Miscarriage by Samantha Busch. Read an excerpt.

Published by Health Communications Inc, 2021

How can you explain to someone who hasn’t yet lived half a decade what forever meant? When you’re three, later and forever are the same thing.

However We Can: A No-Shame Journey to Motherhood by Rena Ejiogu. Read an excerpt.

Published by Rena Ejiogu, 2021

Uche and I started having sex every other day, from days tens to twenty of my cycle, hoping to hit the jackpot that way. The love was gone, I’ll just put it that way. We had to do it because we wanted something, not because we wanted each other.

Flesh & Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life by N. West Moss.

Published by Algonquin Books, 2021

When Dreams Come True: The Heartbreak and Hope on My Journey to Motherhood by Rosanna Davison. Read an excerpt.

Published by Gill Books, 2021

I’ve had to frequently remind myself that I can do anything but not everything as a mum, and that in itself is liberating.

Just Have Sex: An Infertility Memoir by A.L. Guion. Read an excerpt.

Published by Libra Libros LLC, 2022

Being unhappy at their baby news was foolish and immature of me. But I couldn’t help those pangs from beating through me. I realized it was stupid. I recognized it was as foolish as being on a diet but being mad because someone else ate a cookie – it didn’t affect me even a little bit, so I should feel nothing but joy for them. But I wanted a cookie too…

In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation by Isabel Zapata; Translated by Robin Myers. Read an excerpt.

Published by Coffee House Press, 2023

Something ends and something begins in that hospital room, but I’m not sure what. The easiest thing would be to start from the beginning, but the beginning means nothing without what came later, and what came later means nothing without the end. I wish I didn’t have to put this story’s events in order. I’d rather tell all the parts at the same time, one on top of the other and another and another until the words jumble together and turn into blocks of ink, nothing more.

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS – QUEER

Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)fertility by Michelle Tea. Read an excerpt.

Published by Dey Street Books, 2022

A lot of folks have reminded me that there are a lot of unwanted children in the world, which does nothing to spur me toward adoption but only makes me feel bad, like my desire to have a baby is wrong and a correct desire would be a more selfless impulse to save a child in need. But for me, these are two different desires. My sadness at the thought of unwanted children lives in the same part of my mind that feels sadness at the homeless men I see sprawled out and beat up on the curbs in my city, or the thoughts of people being murdered in Syria, or raped woman forced by law to carry their unwanted children to term. It is stashed with all the other heaps of injustices, both general and specific, and feels very, very different from this desire to walk around with something alive inside my body for nine months.

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS – GRAPHIC

Good Eggs: A Memoir by Phoebe Potts. Read an excerpt.

Published by Harper; First Edition, 2010

But I can’t procreate. I can’t do the most basic of female biological functions. Instead, I need a giant institution…all to get my egg& Jeff’s sperm to meet and set up shop in my uterus.

IF: A Memoir of Infertility by Written and illustrated by Sheila Alexander.

Published by Archway Publishing, 2019

What IF?: An infertile graphic novel by Story by Barrie Arliss; Art by Dan Louis Lane.

Published by Independently Published, 2019

Catalogue Baby: A Memoir of (In)fertility by Myriam Steinberg; Illustrated by Christache.

Published by Page Two, 2021

Two-Week Wait: An IVF Story by Luke C. Jackson and Kelly Jackson; Illustrated by Mara Wild.

Published by Scribe US, 2021

NOVELS

The Miracle Seekers: An Anthology of Infertility by Mary Martin Mason. Read an excerpt.

Published by Perspectives Press, 1987

“When your body fails you in the most basic of human expectations,” said Joann, “you remold your ethics and values. I get livid when I hear someone at a dinner party expounding on the evils of test tube babies or using a surrogate. Damn it! Take away their children, tell them they’re sterile, then ask them their philosophy of life.”

Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. Read an excerpt.

Published by Vintage, 2018

“Before you call the snail a weakling, tie your house to your back and carry is around for a week,” I said. I found it strange that Iya Bolu, who had never watched any of her children stop breathing, thought she could tell me how to live my life.