The Hidden Struggles Behind Publishing: One Writer’s Battle with Infertility
But, I can’t claim to know if the comparison totally holds.
My book, an infertility memoir-in-essays, isn’t out until October. What has felt true on my long path to publication is a notion adjacent to the natalist fairytale: the rejection and pain and hope of the querying and submission process is the closest mirror I’ve found to infertility itself.
Most notably, it’s the waiting. In publishing, the infinite stretches of being on hold in anticipation of something happening — for an editor to read, for a response to a query that may never come, recognizing that three or even six months is somehow a reasonable period in which to expect a response — felt so much like the waits I did when I was trying to get pregnant. That unsettled discomfort and bottomless longing while I waited for my period, for an explanation, for an IVF cycle to finally work.
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