The Hidden Struggles Behind Publishing: One Writer’s Battle with Infertility
The lowest moments on the path to publication — the agent who considered taking me on before ghosting me completely, the supposed book deal that fell apart weeks later — brought up feelings I knew intimately. The despair of rejection, the all-consuming longing, the unshakable focus and desire to do something despite a complete lack of control. In this way, the book mirrored not only the process of infertility, it reacquainted me with the emotions I’d grappled with while actually living it.
Despite what I’d told myself about how my career as a magazine editor might be the sort of terrain I could gently fork into a literary path, I was as unprepared for the wilds of book publishing as I’d been when I set out to get pregnant. In both cases, the experience proved an odyssey through all manner of peril. This fall, my book, You May Feel a Bit of Pressure: Observations from Infertility’s Heart-wrenching Ride, will be released 10 years to the month after I sat down to start writing it. Back then there was a baby in my belly; that girl, Hazel, is now a nine-year-old aspiring writer.
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