Infertility was my hobby back in BB (“Before Blogging”) 1998, when your online publication choices were limited to bulletin boards, chat rooms, and HTML web pages. With hindsight firmly in-hand and scattered calendar pages assembled, I re-constructed the time from 1995 forward on a monthly basis, writing what I could recall of the thoughts and feelings I had toward my own trying times. It was part of my job as the first “guide to infertility” for one of the original and largest Internet sites that used hobbyists as experts.
Then I had a baby.
By then, April 1999, I had discontinued chronicling via the Web my struggles with trying to get and stay pregnant, to the tune of four miscarriages in two years, over 500 self-injections (my then-husband was a little too needle-happy, so I don’t even count the handful of times he helped), countless visits to doctors, joyful and heart-breaking ultrasounds, depression-inducing D&C’s, and the ever present endless sense of anxiety-filled worry.
Oh, am I doing it again? Pardon me. It’s been a long time. Back on the wagon with me now.
What happened to me after having a baby — i.e. parenthood — is also a shared experience, one that needs no introduction to even bigger groups of people. So I didn’t bother — except for a brief foray in the early 2000’s — moving on from infertility to writing about pregnancy and parenting stuff, even though doing so would have made better use of my college degree in the same.
I managed to turn my infertility experience into a career. Bully for me. Really. I am, I like to gush with twisted glee, The Infertility Diva. One of the many forms my career has taken is the review of related books. Consumer-directed medical books, alternative therapy books, self-help-ish and how-to books, and of course, memoirs.
At some point, I happily re-sold a lot of books online. They keep coming. I stopped reading them. They kept sending them. Finally, I managed to steer myself off of the infertility press lists, not entirely, but just slightly to one side into wider health writing realms, like fitness and mental illness. Those three topics go hand in hand, you know.
I busied myself writing on things that make my inherited case of hypochondria get seriously twitchy, like heart disease and cancer. My own product of those seemingly endless years of timed sex and strangers peering at my crotch — the product being my son — keeps me alternately entertained, enthralled, and aggravated, like any kid who comes from any starting point.
Little did I know that while my life cruised on, the number of people – by far more women than men — writing memoirs about their infertility had exploded.
Sure, some have had serious enough marketing machines behind them that I’d have to live under a bigger rock than I do to not know about their publication. Peggy O’What’s Her Name’s, for example. Then there are those sent to me by acquaintances I collected through my years of virtual hand-holding and tissue-wielding. Like me, they’d come to the Internet to find answers and solace. Unlike me, they had decided that their plight could have been made better somehow if there had only been a book about a woman’s experience *just like hers.*
That’s part of what wrinkles my eyebrows to no end: the number of these books that start out somewhere, whether in the press materials or the forward or the ‘with gratitude’ notes, decrying the void of similar material in the authors’ own times of need.
What is so hard about Googling “infertility memoir?” If I had a nickel for every author who made some claim that her book, *this* story, is the missing piece of the publication puzzle for every woman who has ever had trouble having a baby…
Recently, I was asked — nay, required by an employer — to review another one, the first I would read and write about in many years. I like the author, I admire her immensely, in fact, so I won’t reveal her name in this rant. Truthfully, her book has elements that have been missing from the others. What hers has that others do not has nothing to do with her infertility story. Her book is different because her perspective is shaped by all those things that mold all of us — her familyof origin, her life’s trail, and how she has put things together in her brain.
Sure, you say, that’s the case with every author, regardless of topic similarity. With that premise, then, each of these infertility memoirs should indeed be as unique as the individuals who wrote them.
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Tracy Morris (tracymorris.com) has written extensively for the Internet, beginning with About.com as their first Guide to Infertility (1997-2002) and as a Consultant to Moms Online (1998-2000), an original part of the Oxygen Media network. Thoughout her prior career of family-centered and medical social work, Tracy spent 15 years in the arenas of substance abuse prevention, residential adolescent psychiatric treatment, foster care, battered women’s shelters, HIV services, and hospitals — all of which may explain why, second only to running around town with her son, her favorite activity is being alone with a computer.
She is a member of the Association of Health Care Journalists, and is presently editor of several patient education newsletters and contributor to websites, blogs, and magazines on health care topics – including How to Make a Family: The Baby-Making Industry from Every Conceivable Angle.