Posts from — February 2010

Just as you begin to see pregnant bellies everywhere when you’re undergoing fertility treatments, you also start to notice it as a plot device in pieces of fiction. Were characters always experiencing infertility and loss, but I never noticed until it was on my daily horizon, or has infertility exploded onto the page in recent years much in the same way it has made it’s way to magazine covers and news stories.

The first time I noticed infertility or loss rear its head in recent fiction came with Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes where the character of Lia leaves her husband after the loss of their child. While loss had certainly been a catalyst in other works of contemporary fiction–from Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing” to Anne Tyler’s Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist–this was one of the first times I had picked up a book and found a side character dealing with the loss of a baby. While those other books discussed the loss of an older child, one who had already established likes and dislikes, a describable personality, this was the first time I was watching fiction explore the death of a baby–an entity described mostly in terms of the birth and those early, personality unformed infant days.

Which isn’t to say that I truly had never encountered a piece of contemporary fiction prior to that point that had loss as a plot device, but if it had been read, it had been something my eyes had glossed over, perhaps because I wasn’t yet part of the infertility and loss community with a finely tuned radar for plot points touching on wonky ovaries.

Stories about infertility and assisted conception pop up in other Weiner books, most notably Certain Girls which contains a surrogacy storyline and her most recent novel, Best Friends Forever, which contains a side story about a police officer whose wife leaves him while they’re dealing with infertility.

Not wanting to pry too deeply into her uterus, I still had to ask Weiner why infertility, loss, and assisted conception feature so heavily in her fiction. Was it because they’re themes she has experienced in her own life? Simply an interesting topic that affects millions of women? Weiner admits,

Pregnancy, conception and infertility figure as plot points in my book because the questions of reproduction — how to avoid it, how to make it happen, how to time it, how to manage its repercussions — loom large for women for major portions of their lives. They are the preoccupations of many of the real women I know, and so they naturally become the focus of my fictional leading ladies. I’ve always been fascinated with the construction of maternity and the shifting definition of what it means to be a good mother — it’s what I wrote my college thesis on. As both a writer and an avid consumer of pop culture, I’m also fascinated with the pressures that women deal with and how the story of maternity gets spun: getting pregnant or not, losing the baby weight, or not, being a blissful full-time caretaker or unapologetically hiring nannies…it’s all fodder for fiction!

And certainly, the inclusion of infertility themes is appreciated by the reader when handled well, especially when it is merely one possibility on the road to parenthood rather than presented as a freakshow a la Octomom.

It’s easy to write it off as a female writer thing (you know, since our floating uteri which cause our hysteria must also assert themselves into our writing) when you only consider recent books by Audrey Niffenegger (Time Traveler’s Wife’s miscarrying Clare) or Lolly Winston (Happiness Sold Separately’s infertile Elinor). But how does that explain that the same plot device is popping up in fiction by male writers such as Andrew Sean Greer’s Confessions of Max Tivoli (miscarrying main character) or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (another marriage ending over infertility and a medical termination).

Which begs the question–are authors giving the public what they want to read, what is already on our minds due to increasing infertility rates, or are authors guiding us towards new ideas to consider? In other words, is our American obsession with infertility (just flip to any tabloid magazine to see which celebrity has recently utilized IVF) a reflection on what is already in the forefront of our minds because it is happening in our homes or has the general public been led to the infertility-storyline river to drink like a thirsty horse? Is this just the natural extension of a society already focused on parenthood, which has burned through its obsession with babies and birth and extended itself backwards to preconception? Or is this the tip of a very large iceberg floating in the ocean as infertility rates continue to rise?

Or was infertility always there, but it takes going through treatments yourself to notice?

cross-posted with BlogHer