Infertility From the Inside

Infertility seems to be a favourite situation of mystery writers. Need a murderer? Make it the baby-obsessed infertile woman. As I said last year, “The infertile woman is ALWAYS the murderer. Or the victim. She’s never the sassy friend nextdoor who needs to nip out to give herself a Follistim injection but ultimately has nothing to do with the murder.”

So when infertility popped up in Magpie by Elizabeth Day, I was ready to stop reading. Except I didn’t. Because every last detail in the book was… correct. Everything she described I had thought or felt or experienced. She used the correct terminology. The correct timing. The correct sensations.

Because a quick Google search revealed that the book is written by someone who gets it. Who has been through it. Who is still going through it.

And while hard to read at times because it felt so raw, so real, and so close, it also was the most comforting read I’ve had in a long time. And I think I would say that even if I was still in the throes of family building. It is a lot like reading blogs. You read them when you’re in the trenches because you feel less alone because you can whisper, “me too.”

And this book had a lot of “me too” moments.

There is a scene on page 198 between the main character and a random stranger in a restaurant bathroom where the random stranger asks her if she has children. “She shook her head. No, she thought, no, I don’t have children. But if you knew how much it cost me to answer that, you wouldn’t ask.”

What it costs to sometimes answer a simple question. The emotional currency you lose as you reach inside for the answer when you already feel like you’ve lost so much. The other person not knowing how much they’re taking from you in that moment. With 15 words, she summed up something I didn’t even realize I thought until I read it on the page and thought, “yes, you get it. Me too.”