A brutally honest and sad testimony of a desperate desire for motherhood.
A woman’s struggle to conceive redefines her capacity to love.
In a graphically detailed, at times solipsistic memoir, Australian novelist Leigh (Disquiet, 2008, etc.) chronicles her efforts, over several years, to conceive a child. In February 2008, the author and Paul, her husband-to-be, visited a fertility clinic to assess their chances for pregnancy. First on their agenda was reversing Paul’s vasectomy, done years earlier after he had a son in a previous marriage. That procedure was only one among countless others: a test to determine Paul’s sperm count; tests clearing them as carriers of illnesses such as hepatitis, HIV, rubella, and syphilis; tests to ascertain Leigh’s hormone levels; and ultrasounds—all before Leigh began treatment to enhance ovulation. Meanwhile, the couple married, but soon the marriage fell apart. “He said I was relegating ‘Us’ to my insistent desire for a child,” she writes. “I couldn’t bear his deliberate procrastinating, his brooding, his rages. The weight of his reproach.” At first, he consented for her to use his sperm for in vitro fertilization; quickly, he changed his mind. “He didn’t think I should be a mother; I was too selfish; I didn’t know how to love,” writes Leigh. Adamant about not using a sperm donor, Leigh pleaded with Paul, struggled to find another donor among men she knew, and finally found a friend who agreed. Years of blood tests, injections, and scans—recounted in detail—resulted in several implanted blastocysts, none of which developed. Over and over, Leigh collapsed in disappointment, only to begin again, submitting her body to continuous manipulation. Paul once had nicknamed her Pollyanna Juggernaut due to her undaunted optimism, but reality finally set in. No matter what the mother’s age, she learned, assisted reproduction rarely results in pregnancy. “It’s an industry predicated on failure,” she realized, and she quit, vowing “to love widely and intensely.”
A brutally honest and sad testimony of a desperate desire for motherhood.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-29276-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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