YOU MAY FEEL A BIT OF PRESSURE

A woman recounts her struggle with infertility in this collection of themed essays.

Ryan was a successful magazine editor and happy wife in her early 30s when she discovered, after long months of unsuccessfully trying to conceive, that she was rarely ovulating. Years would pass before a physician finally diagnosed the author with “true infertility,” by which time she and her husband, Tim, had already embarked on a long, arduous path of fertility treatments, from rounds of Clomid to attempts at frozen embryo transfer. This isn’t a book about accepting defeat or celebrating victory; this is a chronicle of disappointments, delusions, and determination. (Ryan includes a deliberate pause before providing information about how she and Tim proceeded: “I felt compelled to write an infertility story that was not defined by outcome.”) The author is unsparing and includes copious information about her menstrual cycles, hormone injections, lost pregnancies, and wild mood swings. (During the course of one such episode, she convinced herself that she and Tim should buy an isolated Montana estate and start an upscale B&B; the financing fell through.) From the high point of a vacation in Turkey, when Ryan felt the world was her oyster, all the way through an ectopic pregnancy that resulted in the removal of one of her fallopian tubes and a second surgery to extract an ovarian cyst, she movingly emphasizes that “none of us knows how our infertility story may end.” Ryan’s observations about the solace that dedicated, compassionate support can provide in a journey like this one—after that aforementioned doctor callously tossed out the phrase “true infertility,” the Ryans sought out a new doctor whose kindness made a great deal of difference—register as strongly as her honesty about her own strengths and flaws.

A powerfully candid memoir.