"When a woman loses a baby, she is not transformed into an ethereal heroine"

A guest letter from writer Jennie Agg, to commemorate Baby Loss Awareness Week

Some of you might know that tomorrow marks the beginning of Baby Loss Awareness Week in the UK. In commemoration, Jennie Agg, the author of Life, Almost: Miscarriage, Misconceptions and a search for answers from the brink of motherhood has written a beautiful piece for this letter, highlighting some of the art that she turned to after her first miscarriage.

These books and essays and poems are not just about grief and loss and almost-motherhood; they are sources of joy, wisdom, beauty and memory, sating what Jennie beautifully describes as “story hunger”. I am moved by the generosity of her recommendations and honoured to host her as my first guest writer.

Please do forward this letter to anyone who needs it.

---

After my first miscarriage in 2017, something that opened up, alongside the black ravine of grief that took the place of the baby I thought I was going to have, was what I now think of as story hunger. I was desperate for writing that reflected how I felt - and that could help me understand what had happened. Yet all that sprang to mind was a single scene in an old episode of Sex And The City. 

In the heartbroken weeks that followed, other fictional representations of miscarriage would sometimes pop into my head, often from improbable places: The OC. Desperate Housewives. Gossip Girl. Mad Men. The Time Traveler’s Wife. Yet none of it was really it. Frankly, it didn’t touch the sides. But over the next seven years and four more miscarriages, I slowly found the representations I craved: novels, non-fiction, powerful personal essays, poems.

Before we get into them, I have a plea to anyone reading who has not experienced the loss of a pregnancy, or a baby: please don’t assume these books aren’t for you. The loss of a baby can be a particularly othering kind of grief. Many people resist it as unthinkable; almost gothic in its horror and darkness. And, unlike other kinds of writing on difficult subjects – other kinds of grief – people rarely turn to the topic for universal lessons. 

But they should. 

Many of the books listed here have done so much more than simply mirror my own emotions – they’ve enriched the way I think and feel. Such stories can lead you “deeper into the mechanisms of life and love and fear and pain”, to quote Rob Delaney, explaining why he wrote his memoir A Heart That Works, about the death of his young son, Henry.  And isn’t that what reading is all about? 

First things first: a practical companion. I wish immediately after our first loss, someone could have handed me a book like Pippa Vosper’s Beyond Grief: Navigating the Journey of Pregnancy and Baby Loss. A warm, wise compendium of advice and insight, drawn from Pippa’s own experience of losing her son, Axel, it also contains interviews with women who’ve experienced different kinds of loss, from recurrent miscarriage to termination for medical reasons.  

After an early miscarriage, especially, you can feel like you exist in a perpetual in-between. In her memoir, Adrift, Miranda Ward recounts six years of trying for a baby, including IVF, ectopic pregnancy and miscarriages. She describes this liminality, a “cusp of motherhood: almost motherhood”, as a place. She writes: 

“It’s a place, sure as the swimming pool or the park or the pub on the corner of your road is a place – it’s just not a very well defined one. Some people pass through it without even noticing: some people languish here for a little while or a long while, held safe, held prisoner, by the walls of not-knowing”.  

Adrift is also that rare thing – a memoir about infertility that does not resolve neatly with a positive pregnancy test. And in No One Talks About This Stuff, a collection of essays edited by Kat Brown, there are 22 diverse perspectives on ‘almost parenthood’, from stillbirth to involuntary childlessness. If stories of pregnancy loss are still relatively rare – especially in mainstream publishing – stories that address how it feels to not end up with a child at all are even rarer. Yet these are important. Not only because this is reality for many people, who deserve to have their stories heard, but because the absence of such stories perpetuates a deeply unhelpful idea that the only way to heal from the loss of a baby is with another baby.  

Another incredibly moving memoir is If Not For You, by Georgina Lucas, about the premature birth of her son Grey ­– and his death 21 days later. The prose is understated and all the more powerful for it. It made me think about what it truly means to be a parent. Likewise, The Song Of The Wide World, by Tamarin Norwood, is a precise and lyrical account of the birth and death of her son, Gabriel, who she knew would not live, following a diagnosis part-way through her pregnancy. I think what left the deepest impression on me is how Norwood shows you not only the deep sorrow in birthing a baby who only lives for 72 minutes, but also what was sacred about it.

(Both The Song Of The Wide World and If Not For You touch very poignantly on parenting small children through the loss of an expected sibling, too.) 

I’ve recently finished An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken. In this slim memoir (my ebook edition has just 94 pages), you learn two things almost right away: the author’s first child died in utero, around the time of her due date – and her second baby was born a year and five days later. McCracken grapples with the complexity of loving and parenting the baby that follows a baby who died, as well as the often paradoxical ways she feels in her grief:

“I don’t want those footprints framed on the wall, but I don’t want to hide them beneath the false bottom of a trunk. I don’t want to wear my heart on my sleeve or put it away in cold storage. I don’t want to fetishize, I don’t want to repress, I want his death to be what it is: a fact. Something that people know without me having to explain it. I don’t the need to tell my story to everyone, but when people ask, Is this your first child? I can’t bear any of the possible answers.”

An Exact Replica also has a seam of dry humour running throughout, reminding the reader that those who go through terrible things are not suddenly transformed into tragic, ethereal heroines: the flat magazine trope we are often served of women who lose a baby. 

McCracken writes that she wasn’t someone who always wanted children. During her second pregnancy, she gets told off in antenatal classes for making jokes. In the surreal days after she finds out her son has died in utero, but before she gives birth to his body, she sits in a bar and smokes a cigarette (and then regrets it). In other words, she is complicated, imperfect – a real person, not a cautionary tale. 

For a partner’s perspective on pregnancy loss – a side of the story we hear of less frequently – Strange Bodies: A Story of Loss and Desire by the artist Tom de Freston is both a love letter to his wife, as she loses pregnancy after pregnancy and a profound meditation on shared grief: when an experience is the same, but also not the same – how grief can bond, but also divide. Memoir is blended with art criticism, descriptions of paintings de Freston created during this time, and the stories that inspire his work: in particular the myth of Orpheus, desperately trying to retrieve the woman he loves from the underworld. 

Small: On Motherhoods, Clare Lynch’s brief but poetic memoir of having children with her wife, also contains some very moving sections on miscarriage and IVF cycles that do not work. Lynch writes from both sides: as the partner who is not pregnant and, it’s revealed as the book goes on, as the one who originally tried to carry their baby. Lynch writes:

“When we’d discussed this change of roles with the counsellor, just a possibility, a Plan B, she had warned against it. Other couples she had worked with had fallen for this temptation. 

Think of the jealousy, she had said. The resentment. 

How could anyone bear it? The pregnancy you had dreamed of for so long, right there in your house, in your bed, but not in your body.”

Solace can be also be found in non-fiction which blends personal writing with cultural analysis. The Seed: Infertility Is a Feminist Issue, by Canadian journalist Alexandra Kimball - whose writing has been compared to Barbara Ehrenreich and Eula Biss - makes the case for how reproductive loss and infertility has often been an oversight in feminist discourse and The Brink of Being: Talking About Miscarriage, by Julia Bueno, includes valuable insights gathered from Bueno’s work as a psychotherapist. 

“Saying ‘miscarriage’ out loud was like putting my uterus on the table, bleeding and scarred and radiating misuse…All children, living or dead, come from bloody uteruses and vaginas – things polite people don’t discuss – but the logic of misogyny, which carves out a space of relative respect for some mothers (especially the wealthy, white, and married), means we usually agree to forget this. The beauty of the child erases its origins in the female body and sexuality. But when these parts go wrong and there is no child, nothing is redeemed. It’s just the spectre of the female body and sexuality: blood, mucous, infection. Death.” 

For a longer view, Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Jessica Cox and A Good Time To Be Born - paediatrician Perri Klass’s exploration of how we drastically improved child mortality rates over the last 100 years – have chapters on loss that offer a historical perspective, which simultaneously illustrate how much has changed… and what hasn’t.  

It's easy to assume that previous generations were inured to this kind of grief, when pregnancy and infancy were perilous in ways that are almost unimaginable to us in the world’s wealthiest countries now, and when people typically had many more children than they tend to now. But Klass offers a corrective: 

“Even when these deaths were common, parents mourned and grieved with the same strong mix of emotions we feel today, and through history, many adult lives were shaped forever by that grief”.

In fiction, a standout book for me is Anna Hogeland’s electrifying novel The Long Answer. It starts with a phone conversation between two sisters, Anna and Margot. Anna is 12 weeks pregnant, when Margot calls to say she’s had a miscarriage. From there, the book expertly weaves together the story of Anna’s pregnancy with those of other women – a friend of her sister’s, a chance encounter at an antenatal yoga class, her own mother, a stranger in a bar.

Through these narrative tentacles, the novel carefully explores all kinds of reproductive experiences: surrogacy, termination for medical reasons, teenage pregnancy. But it wears its ideas delicately. The characters are vivid - at times reminding me of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - while the book’s startling interruptions make clear that the novel is, in parts, a work of autofiction.  (After I finished, I went away and read this piece by Hogeland about her own losses).

I also recommend Annie Kirby’s evocative debut The Hollow Sea. It’s the story of Scottie, who is reeling from multiple rounds of unsuccessful IVF treatment and haunted by her “will o’ the wisps” – the “not-quite ghosts” of children who didn’t make it. Rather than commit to yet another frozen embryo transfer, Scottie impulsively signs up to volunteer counting seals on the remote North Atlantic island of St Hía, where she becomes tangled up in the mysteries of her own past and the myths of this strange, new place, including the legend of Thora, the Bride-Witch: a baby stealer.

---

If essays feel more manageable than a book, ‘The Flavors of My Grief’ is a beautiful piece by food writer Yasmin Khan, exploring her experience of recurrent miscarriage through appetite and recipes. For Khan, food is by turns a comfort and a punishment. Heartbroken and unable to eat, she writes: 

“The flavors of my grief were different to the flavors I was used to. They didn’t dance on my tongue, they trespassed on my body.”

Later, she writes:

“Hope smelled like warm bread baking in an oven, it tasted like a scoop of pistachio ice cream enjoyed on a hot summer’s day, it felt like a bowl of roasted pumpkin soup eaten by a roaring fire.”

Likewise, if you haven’t read ‘Thanksgiving In Mongolia’, Ariel Levy’s seminal piece for the New Yorker in 2013, about her miscarriage at 16 weeks while away on a journalistic assignment, I urge you to. The experience is later included and expanded upon in her memoir about baby loss, the breakdown of her marriage and her journey of erotic and intellectual discovery, The Rules Do Not Apply.

In poetry, Julia Copus’s collection The World’s Two Smallest Humans has some haunting, elegant poems about the ambiguous grief that follows an IVF cycle that doesn’t work. Such as this, from Lapse:

“Put simply, the womb

was an open palm:

glabrous, dumb,

It had not known

to close. Just that.”

And finally – with apologies if this is just too Bougie Literary Woman™ for words – I periodically return to Sylvia Plath’s poem, Parliament Hill Fields, written just after her miscarriage. In it, Plath walks alone, amidst a passing gaggle of noisy school children, who are entirely indifferent to her. The bare trees. The detail of the dropped hair clip. And a line that sums up a complicated type of pain so succinctly:

“Your absence is inconspicuous

nobody can tell what I lack.”