There’s a well-worn trope in the literary world that publishing a book is an act of creation analogous to producing a human life. Authors refer to their “book babies,” announce due dates, celebrate publication birthdays, enlist book doulas. “It’s your baby!” I’ve been told of my forthcoming debut. “It must feel like you’re giving birth to another child.”
And, sure: it’s a conception only possible through great care and love and the deepest sort of nurturing, culminating in the grueling work of pushing something beautiful into the world.
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.
Though even as one wait flowed into the next, it didn’t matter much anyway, because in books, as in babies, it’s all or nothing. There’s no chipping away, inching incrementally closer to your goal, celebrating modest wins as you close the gap. You either sell your book or you don’t. You get to hold your baby or you don’t. And to keep going, to find a way forward when your entire query column is a tally of nos, when there isn’t one remaining imprint on your submission list, when your body refuses to accept even the healthiest embryo and grow it into a baby — you require a sort of obsessive belief in what could be, what you just know is possible, even when the universe seems hell bent on proving otherwise. To be the driving force in an act of creation requires something deeper than stamina, something steelier, like an unyielding, existential urge that says: Pick yourself up. Do not stop. What else is there?
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.
I never imagined I’d sit with this story for so long, a proper decade of gestation. In cradling it against my chest, gazing into its eyes each morning when I opened my laptop, the most traumatic period of my life has grown into something I can’t quite imagine living without.
When you’ve been pregnant with something for a decade, it’s hard to know who you’ll be once you finally let it go.
I may not be “birthing” this book, but its publication does feel like something of a rebirth. I’m a different woman than the one who began telling this story. I’m now a mother of three, for starters. I’m also someone who tells strangers that I’m infertile, something inconceivable to that newly pregnant woman whose suffering — whose shame — was still so fresh. “Wow, a book!” people say. “What’s it about?” I used to mumble something vague about nonfiction, a memoir, and pray there’d be no follow-ups. But, over time, I’ve grown into someone who says clearly, “It’s an infertility memoir-in-essays.” Period.
I’ve lived with my infertility story long enough for its familiar traumas to have molded around me, both womb and armor, a cushion of pain I’ve already lived, as though that can somehow protect me from the unnamed future pain out there, dark spots on a horizon I cannot yet see. But the moment has come to release the story, this book, myself. There is life to be lived on the other side.
Amy Gallo Ryan is a Brooklyn-based writer and former magazine editor whose work has appeared in Elle, Cosmopolitan, Self and Real Simple, among other publications. Her personal essays have been published on Motherwell, Literary Mama and MER Literary. You May Feel a Bit of Pressure, her infertility-memoir-in-essays, will be released in October 2025 from Unsolicited Press. To learn more visit amygalloryan.com.
