THE WRECK

Longing for a baby, a woman discovers her family’s gnarled history.

In this intimate and candid memoir, Jackson—a professor of English, writer on race and literature, and co-author of The Toni Morrison Book Club—recounts two grueling experiences: undergoing a lengthy period of in vitro fertilization beginning when she was 36 and, at the same time, painfully probing family mysteries. Why, she wonders, do she and her older sister look so different? What happened in the car crash that killed so many in her father’s family, including his first wife, mother, sister, and 4-year-old niece, for whom Jackson was named? Both of her desires—for a child and for answers to gnawing questions—became as obsessive as they were frustrating, and both were entangled with issues of race. Jackson suffered insensitive treatment by physicians, nurses, and therapists, Black and White, old and young. One Black doctor assured her that Black women have no problems with fertility, unlike White women. Indeed, in the Alabama town where she grew up, there were many teenage mothers, including a 15-year-old who had her brother’s son. “Poor Black girls have babies because nobody expects them to do anything else,” Jackson observes. Near her home in New Jersey, the sight of a pregnant Black teenager elicits “envy and disgust” that the girl has what she, an educated, professional Black woman, is struggling for. Jackson reveals her desperation when repeated hormone treatments yielded few eggs; and when those eggs were fertilized, pregnancies failed. She found herself grieving the loss of embryos, just as she had been grieving her lost relatives, “people whose ghosts have haunted us ever since I can remember being alive.” The author creates vivid portraits of her stoic, irreverent, and warmhearted father; her judgmental, pragmatic mother; and her supremely patient and loving husband. Though the book’s subtitle gives away the happy ending, tension never flags.

A perceptive memoir about race, love, and legacy.