Book Focus: A Pregnant Pause of a Different Sort

Is it time for a new book? Let me explain.

Most of the people who blog about Infertility are in various stages of the waiting game: preparing for treatment; or cycle monitoring; or adoption red tape. I live a different sort of Infertility limbo (that would be door number three here in this illustration).

Within weeks of ending formal IF treatments — a second job if there ever was one — I channeled my excess nervous energy into writing. First it was writing for the sake of emptying my head of the conflicted feelings caused by infertility. Getting the thoughts on paper was cathartic. Who knew thoughts could be so caustic?

In time, I realized my writing might be of service to those like me.  The book project — to write honestly about the magnitude of infertility made all the more painful when treatments don’t work — was a little like being pregnant with a big idea. The story is aimed at being the type of book a couple trying to conceive can give to family or friends who are fortunate enough NOT to have to face infertility firsthand. It provides a window into what it’s like for one in eight couples to live the torture and indignity of being, well, fruitless.

The Silent Sorority manuscript has undergone many iterations and the latest version, restructured in July/August, is now in the hands of a few friends. I’m nervously awaiting their reactions.  It’s unfair, I admit, to ask friends to critique as they’re often too kind to offer the tough criticisms needed to mold a book into commercial fare.  So here I am waiting and wondering if I’ve given birth to something that will get adopted and read beyond my inner circle.

Silent Sorority addresses many of the issues we’ve all raised so often in our hearts, minds and blogs. I am struck time and again by the frustrations we all share trying to convey to the fertile world how indescribably difficult living with infertility truly is.