Review by New York Times Review
Elizabeth katkin has a daunting list of what she endured over nine years to have two children, including seven miscarriages, eight fresh in vitro fertilization cycles, two frozen I.V.F. attempts, five natural pregnancies and 10 doctors. All of this is recounted in her memoir-slash-manual, "Conceivability: What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility," which is highly instructive on things like the difference between fresh and frozen I.V.F. cycles, the need to ask pointed questions at fertility clinics and the value of taking risks on less conventional treatments. Her conclusions about traditional methods are damning. Katkin is a former attorney who selfidentifies as a Type A personality more than once. (Her editor might have said, "No need to tell, I think you've shown!") She's also privileged. Over the course of her marathon toward motherhood, she visits two fertility clinics in London, one in New York, another in Moscow and has consultations in Boston, Geneva and Frankfurt. She injects herself with drugs in a Moroccan desert. Her fourth miscarriage "happened at an ice polo tournament that should have been the treat of a lifetime." In the pursuit of her second child, Katkin ditches birthday plans in the United Arab Emirates to fly to Russia for egg retrieval. What are you going to do when you really want to have children and your body is not cooperating? You skip the Coldplay concert in Dubai and get on the flight to Moscow. Sometimes Katkin comes off as the Jason Bourne of fertility patients. In her introduction, Katkin says that since having her children - a girl, then a boy, both by the same gestational surrogate - she has developed what her husband calls a side practice, "helping friends, and friends of friends, and cousins of friends all over the world to conceive and carry their babies." She is not oblivious to her financial good fortune, even if it sometimes feels that way; she says it is her hope that her insights "may help others who do not have the luxury to spend so much time and money searching the world for best practices." They may do just that. Katkin unrelentingly questions the whole infertility industrial complex. Under her cross-examination, the expert opinions of various doctors seem to wilt, at least on the page. Except for a select few, like Dr. Oxana of Moscow, who convinces Katkin that the high doses of chemicals and hormones to which she had been subjected for nearly a decade may have harmed the eggs doctors were harvesting from her. During her second attempt at I.V.F., Katkin, who is 40, produces 40 eggs, which seems like a waste when they don't result in a baby. But Dr. Oxana disagrees with the popular wisdom that aging eggs diminish in value. She successfully retrieves and fertilizes four eggs from Katkin, testing the embryos to be sure they are chromosomally normal and then implanting them in the surrogate. This procedure yields Katkin's second child and her undying devotion to Dr. Oxana. Meanwhile, a doctor she saw five years earlier, in London, whose lab blundered monumentally by thawing five of Katkin's embryos prematurely, should be glad Katkin was kind enough to identify him only as "Dr. P." Of that incident Katkin writes, "Our potential little babies: gone. I don't know which was stronger, my fury or my despair." What comes through loudest is the anger. Katkin married at 30, imagining that by the time she was 35 she and her husband, Richard, would have become a foursome. As the years go by and that scenario doesn't materialize, she's shocked. But she doesn't let go of her vision, even as she learns she's fighting polycystic ovarian syndrome, aneuploidy (an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell) and an overactive immune system that rebels against a fetus as a foreign body. While Katkin is dealing with infertility, she's navigating becoming a partner in an international law firm. Nevertheless, she persists, even when Richard is ready to call it a day, having had enough of "the fertility drama." There's a grimness to "Conceivability." It's the book you hand to a friend in reproductive trouble, and maybe apologetically, especially if the friend is not the type to think of fetuses as precious angels, like Katkin. YOU'D have no such qualms about handing anyone "An Excellent Choice: Panic and Joy on My Solo Path to Motherhood," by the journalist Emma Brockes. "This isn't a story about technology; it's a story about love," she says of this memoir about deciding in her mid-30s to have a child in a manner inconsistent with heteronormative ideals. Like "Conceivability," "An Excellent Choice" contains accounts of fertility clinics and a scene of dwindling hope in a public toilet, but there is nothing grim about it. Nor is a desire to get pregnant a prerequisite for reading it. Brockes, an Englishwoman living in New York and the author of a previous memoir, "She Left Me the Gun," about her mother, is so smart and tartly charming (think "Fleabag" meets Helen Fielding) that it doesn't much matter that you sense an obligation to make a word count as she vacillates about some aspects of her story, particularly her relationship with her sortof-partner, L. It's hard to fault her: While Brockes is another woman of privilege (and diligent savings), as a 21st-century freelance journalist she lives like a polar bear, hopping from one glossy magazine ice floe to another. She'd likely be the first to admit she's dancing for her supper in this memoir. L is identified only by an initial because she "is not a writer and finds the endless use to which I put my own life distasteful." When the story begins, L has just had a baby boy. She's stable and kind but they aren't an easy match. L sees Brockes as frustratingly without needs; Brockes is initially baffled by why that would be a problem. They once had a fight over assembling a bed from West Elm and didn't speak for a week. (Could someone please make a TV show about these women?) What Brockes wants is a sort of parallelplay style of parenting, where L raises her son and Brockes her own child, with the two women living near enough to each other for mutual support - "a Venn diagram of two independent families." Brockes offsets potential confusion with this simple declarative: "She did not want a baby as an expression of her love for me. I did not want a baby as a reflection of my love for her." The dilemma of whether parallel parenting will work with L long term isn't answered (at book's end, they're living that Venn diagram dream, in the same apartment building, on different floors, so fingers crossed). Brockes creates dramatic tension by debating the virtues of using known sperm donors as opposed to strangers, and whether to rely on the British health care system - socialized but slow - or her adopted country's for assisted reproduction. She settles on America, "where no one with adequate resources waits for anything." At 37, Brockes is far more skeptical going into the process than Katkin is, attuned to overly optimistic talk at the first clinic she visits: "Patient denial is an act of psychological defense; doctor denial is scalping." (She, too, identifies a doctor only by an initial, although her issues with Dr. ? mostly revolve around his admiration for Julian Assange.) Brockes starts with the assumption that the drugs she takes to stimulate her ovaries are bad, but a necessary means to the end. L is more cautious, almost as if she has read Katkin's story, advising fewer drugs after a failed attempt at intrauterine insemination. But when Brockes produces a year's worth of eggs after using drugs to stimulate her ovaries, she struts "around feeling great about myself on account of my MASSIVE EGG STASH. Suddenly, I understand why men go in for penis enlargements." She, like Katkin, experiences hideous swelling from ovarian hyperstimulation, although hers ends happily, with pregnancy. Twins, no less. It's in these passages that Brockes gets at the undeniable but typically unspoken competitiveness among women when it comes to fertility. One child would be much easier, and cheaper, and place her on an even playing field with L and her one child. And yet, "way down deep in my bones I am cheering them on," she says of her impending babies. To be fertile is to be celebrated. To be multiply fertile, even better. This frank admission of self-satisfaction in "good" numbers is to be reminded of how agonizing it must have been for Katkin, the Type A, to be continually held back after the starting gun in the race to reproduction. There's "ability" right there in her title. Hold these two books up against each other and, certainly, "Conceivability" is primarily a story about technology as a means to beat infertility. But "An Excellent Choice" isn't purely a story about love. They're both accounts from the front lines of reproduction, a place where there is no such thing as absolute fairness. mary pols is the author of "Accidentally on Purpose: The True Tale of a Happy Single Mother."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
After her thirty-seventh birthday, journalist Brockes decided to have a baby. A Londoner living in New York City, she approaches the U.S. fertility industry with an outsider's perspective and provides insights on the effects of consumer-driven care. She brings readers along as she decides whether to ask friends for sperm (too emotionally complicated) and how to choose a sperm donor (at a certain point, just pick). Without going into too much detail, she also discusses how she navigates pregnancy while in a committed relationship with L., a woman who recently had her own baby. Brockes includes details throughout of her own childhood and close relationship with her South African mother, whom she wrote about in She Left Me the Gun (2014). Written primarily in present tense, Brockes' second memoir will have readers caught up in the excitement and anxiety of pregnancy along with her. Her humor and empathy shine through, even during her most challenging moments. Whether parents, aspiring parents, or happily child-free, readers will enjoy Brockes' intimate story of how she became a mother.--Chanoux, Laura Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British journalist Brockes¿s thoughtful memoir of becoming a single parent at the age of 39 focuses primarily on the hurdles faced on the path to motherhood rather than on life after delivering twins. Brockes (She Left Me the Gun) was preoccupied with her career during her 20s and 30s, though she had always known that one day she wanted to have kids. At age 37, she set out to get pregnant via a sperm donor and IVF treatment (her partner, a woman referred to as ¿L,¿ already had a child of her own, and the couple opted to keep their Upper West Side households separate while remaining partners). Brockes takes readers on a fascinating and sometimes frustrating journey through fertility treatments, dashed hopes and delays, often accenting her tale with clever comparisons of the American and the British health care systems (¿How on earth can one buy medical treatment the same way one buys three-for-two cans of beans at Costco?¿). Along the way the fiercely independent Brockes realizes that while she can do almost anything she pleases alone, it¿s quite acceptable to ask for help: not only does she hire a baby nurse but she accepts her partner¿s advice to lease an apartment that¿s become available just below hers. This is an uplifting, well-told story, in which Brockes walks the fine line between surrendering to chance (i.e., not one but two babies) and taking charge to make tough but excellent choices. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fertility memoir with a whiff of Tristram Shandy.British journalist Brockes (She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me, 2013, etc.) recounts the process by which she and "L" decided to bear children as single, working mothers in a nontraditional but loving relationship. The author spent her 20s in the grip of an all-consuming dream job: writing for the Guardian. The sudden breakup of a three-way work marriage (one of her best friends fell pregnant) propelled her all the way to New York and onto the path toward having not just one baby, but twins, all by herself. Her eccentric narrative hazes over the challenges of same-sex parenting to focus on the fertility industry and the alternative structure that she and L created to make up for their hopeless incompatibility as live-in partners. They found matching apartments on different floors of the same Upper West Side high rise, which enabled them to bring the kids together regularly, but each woman parented her own children to suit herself. Brockes plays up the contrast in fertility treatment styles between England and the U.S., but while she extols the stolidity and sensibility of her national health care birthright, she can't help but glory in the comparatively free-wheeling American market for intrauterine insemination and in vitro fertilization as one more indication that her adopted country is the "place where the future happens first." Her quirky, neurotic intensity pairs well with the brisk pace she has crafted after so many years writing to deadlines, and she holds little back. The book speaks to a growing contingent of would-be parents who reach their 30s and 40s and find they have the means and motivation to have kids outside of a conventional domestic partnership, embracing their chosen single parenthood as a form of empowerment. It seems as if almost everyone bearing a child is writing a book about it, but Brockes is too original a personality to fall in quietly with the rest.A disarming and casually hilarious take on the opposite of co-parenting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
