Hello again,
I know I don’t normally write to you on a Friday, but today marks a whole year since my first book – Life, Almost: Miscarriage, misconceptions, and a search for answers from the brink of motherhood – was published.
Life, Almost (the book) is available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Waterstones, and Blackwell’s (which ships internationally). You can also get it for Kindle or on Audible and Spotify.
I’m reluctant to describe today as a ‘birthday’ (for reasons you don’t exactly need to be a therapist to work out, I can get a bit twitchy when authors compare their books to babies) but I wanted to mark this milestone anyway. Especially as the paperback edition isn’t going to be released until September.
I’m not going to gloss over it: publishing a book about something so personal, and which also has a campaigning element to it, has at times been quite overwhelming.
With hindsight, I can see I was putting enormous pressure on myself when it first came out. Once I’d finished the initial publicity push around its launch, I realised that a part of me (a grandiose/borderline-delusional part of me) was expecting the publication of the book to somehow fix everything, both personal and political.
And, of course, it didn’t do that. While I hope the book has had its own gentle impact, it was never going to fix everything. How could it? Apart from anything else, the one thing writing this book definitely couldn’t do was to erase or make up for everything that happens in it. Those things still happened to me and to Dan. They will always have happened.
Anyway, this was meant to be an upbeat email, in which I celebrate something that I did, in a straightforwardly proud way. Because, a year on, I am proud I did this.
So, as a one-year anniversary bonus, I thought I’d share a short extract with you. It’s at the forefront of my mind, as I included it in a speech I gave to a workshop hosted by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology this morning.
(Paying subscribers can also listen to two audio extracts from the book here and here, read by me.)
From Chapter 5 : ‘She doesn’t carry well’
Being told that there is no ‘cause’ for your repeated miscarriages feels like the floor has given out beneath you. It happened to us one cold, bright January morning, six months after our third miscarriage. I’d barely taken my coat off before the doctor started rattling off the things I had tested negative for: antiphospholipid antibodies, lupus anti-coagulant, factor V Leiden, prothrombin gene mutation . . .
‘I know it doesn’t feel like it, but this is good news,’ the doctor said.
My husband Dan had to go back to work straight after the appointment and, for reasons I can’t really explain, even to myself, I decided to take myself shopping rather than go home alone. And so I stood staring at the flat, grey shop frontages, willing my feet to unstick themselves from the pavement. How could the answer be nothing?
I ended up wandering around the beauty hall of one of London’s more famous department stores. Again, for reasons I can’t explain, I let myself be persuaded to try a new facial, which used ‘medical-grade lasers’ to remove pollution and dead skin cells from your pores. Upstairs in the treatment room, the form I was handed asked if I’d had any surgery in the last year. I wrote in tight, cramped letters that six months ago I’d had an operation to remove the remains of a pregnancy, under general anaesthetic. When I handed the clipboard back to the beautician, she didn’t mention it. I wished that she would. As I lay back and felt the hot ping of the laser dotting across my forehead, it struck me how ridiculous this was; that this laser-facial is something humans have figured out how to do. How someone, somewhere, in a lab or the boardroom of a cosmetics conglomerate, has come up with this – a solution to a problem that barely needed solving – and yet no one can tell me why I can’t carry a baby.
The cause-less state you find yourself in without a definitive explanation for your miscarriages can be a frightening, bound- less space. All the recrimination you had once directed at yourself, which you had been able to put to one side while you waited for a concrete, medical answer, comes pouring back.
With no known cause, the list of possible unknown causes feels infinite. You are cut adrift in a horizon-less sea of recommendations from women on Mumsnet, private doctors, herbalists, healers, nutritionists, and ever-more-expensive fertility supplements. After the disappointment of our own inconclusive results, I read a cult bestseller that promises to tell you how to improve the quality of your eggs. Much of its advice was about reducing your exposure to certain ‘hormone- disrupting’ chemicals. I stopped wearing nail varnish and perfume. I stopped heating up food in plastic and tried to avoid touching till receipts. I bought another book, based on traditional Chinese medicine. In a bid to keep my womb ‘warm’, I took to wearing socks and slippers at all times, avoided cold floors, and added ginger oil to my bath. I didn’t know how much I believed in any of it, but I did it anyway – anything to quell the anxiety that I was to blame, somehow. Anything to ignore my deepest fear: that I am fundamentally inhospitable; unsuited to motherhood.
If you got this far, thank you for reading (and indulging me). Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.
Beautifully raw, thank you for sharing this excerpt x
Thank you for the excerpt. I had a weird dream last night where I dreamt I was having a 4th early miscarriage days after getting a positive test, so clearly miscarriages are on my mind even though I have not had a positive test since my 3rd miscarriage in January of 2023. Thank you for sharing writing that always resonates with how I feel.