Wanting a Child

Book Overview

With humor, courage, pain, and joy, the writers in this collection of personal essays and fiction share the same dream - the wish for a child. Here they reveal their complicated but mostly successful... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374525943
• ISBN13: 9780374525941
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Heartfelt and excellently written

I happened to come across this book after the loss of a pregnancy, and it was deeply moving. Through the authors' own stories, I was able to process my own and to truly heal. I have given it to friends coping with the longing for a child amidst difficulties, as it provides a beautiful, sincere lens with which to help make sense of the often difficult and emotional path to a child.

We're not alone!

So often during the seven+ months that my husband and I have been actively trying to have a baby, we have felt very alone. Like the rest of the world has not a trouble in the world getting pregnant, and we're the oddballs who can't manage it with him looking at me cross-eyed.But this book was so wonderful, if only because it reminded us that we are NOT alone. There are MANY people in the world who are in our situation, or in more dire situations than ours. Sometimes it helps just knowing that we're not the only ones.

Beautiful, complex writing about wanting children

I always find people's stories about their infertility and fertility to be very moving. Stories about children and parents are always the most heartbreaking. But in the hands accomplished writers like the 22 in this 90%-nonfiction anthology, the subject is very nearly devastating in its sadness, joy, and beauty. I traded most of my own writing time for time with my own long-sought-after children, and reading these writers made me feel, really for the first time, the pain of what I gave up to be a father! Writing, too, can be so wonderful! WANTING A CHILD is not a breezy read because the writing generally is complex, though always quite clear. And there are maybe two duds. But overall, it is just magnificent.

Inspirational.

I found this to be an excellent book. My husband and I are coping with secondary infertility. The real-life trials and tribulations of the people in this book gave me some new found hope to continue my journey. The writers of each of the individual cases did an excellent job of depicting their quest for parenthood.