Over the past several years, Graywolf Press has developed a knack for publishing young female essayists who write intelligently and frankly about their lives as women, particularly their experiences of the female body and motherhood. Leslie Jamison considered female pain in The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss examined her decision to vaccinate her son in On Immunity, and now in a worthy successor, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, Belle Boggs delves into the complicated subject of infertility.
It is to Boggs’s infinite credit that The Art of Waiting never descends into whining or anxious uterus-gazing. “The narrative failed,” she writes at one point of a support-group meeting, “because it was about only one thing: becoming pregnant. I needed my story to be more flexible.” Hers is: she makes the problem of infertility palpable, even for someone like me, who has never had the slightest twinge of baby fever. (And why am I so surprised by this? I’ll most likely never go to war, but I’ve still read plenty of books about it without questioning their relevance.) And she does so with a generosity of spirit befitting both the best parents and the best writers. v
By Belle Boggs (Graywolf) Boggs appears in conversation with Eula Biss Fri 9/16, 7:30 PM Women & Children First 5233 N. Clark 773-769-9299womenandchildrenfirst.com Free
