Text: “Olivia Hutton Designs”
FADE TO:
Interview: OLIVIA BENDER, 43 years old, wearing black-framed sunglasses, a no-nonsense pantsuit, and carrying a green leather sample bag, leaves her business and walks quickly down the streets, ignoring the camera.
Text: “Olivia Bender”
Interview: OLIVIA stops, whips off sunglasses, faces the camera head-on.
B-Roll: （SLOW PAN） Sunshine moving across the floor of a high-end kitchen.
Observational: A wineglass rolls along the marble countertop and teeters on the edge…
SMASH CUT TO:
B-Roll: Waves crash on the beach. A fine spray of water covers the camera lens. A solitary figure moves down the beach in soft focus.
FADE TO BLACK
Music: The Ting Tings, “That’s Not My Name.”
Narrator: The police were shocked when Olivia Bender left town suddenly.
Sound: Rapid footsteps, high heels on concrete.
Sound: Voice calling Olivia’s name.
Olivia: I’m not comfortable being the focus of this. Park and I have made our peace with the situation. I was crushed by the revelation of his children, and clearly, the media intrusion was too much for our marriage to bear. I had to leave. It was the only thing to do. That’s all I have to add. Please leave me alone.
Sound: Glass shattering.
Narrator: After this single brief interview, Olivia Bender declined to participate further with this documentary.
Sound: Silence.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Please be aware, what follows is a frank discussion of infertility. It may be distressing to some readers.
Life imitates art, and art imitates life. These pages belong to the characters within; these are their stories. And yet, much of what you’ve just read has its roots in reality. My reality.
I don’t like being a statistic, but I am one of 10 percent of women who suffer from infertility. Our path echoes Olivia and Park’s too closely; multiple pregnancies, multiple miscarriages, fertility treatments and IUIs, cross-country booty calls after early ovulation triggers, failed IVFs. Losing twins was the last straw; we closed up shop and forged ahead, knowing we weren’t meant to parent our own children.
We didn’t tell many of our struggles because inevitably, well-meaning and invariably kind advice was offered. No matter what you say to an infertile couple—outside of “I’m so sorry, that sucks”—it will be taken wrongly. （“You can always adopt” is particularly egregious.） It’s the hormones, you see. Pregnancy brain combined with the delightful cocktail of injectables in legs and stomachs and buttocks that bring your body to the brink of pseudo-menopause only to make your cycle start again in order to get you pregnant…homicidal tendencies have nothing on a woman in a suppression cycle.
I can look back on it now with rueful amusement. At the time, it was scary, frustrating, and painful, on many levels, physical and emotional.
Partners who are not being shot up but have their part to play, especially those providing semen, have their own delightful challenges, physical and emotional. The “Sweet Home Alabama” incident is real. It was after that particular day, in mild hysterics, that my husband mentioned this event should really make it into a book.
Honestly, we’d never planned to have children right away. That we went down the path at all can be blamed on my biological clock kicking into gear. In the library parking lot, two tiny girls in pink tutus danced across my path, and it was as if a bell rang, deep, resonating, and loud, inside of me—YOU MUST HAVE THOSE NOW. This combined with the news of the celebrity pregnancy of one of my film idols （Jennifer Garner, you adorable creature） and I found myself popping open a bottle of the good wine to propose a moratorium on birth control. I joked we’d get pregnant that first time trying, or we’d end up doing IVF. Both were true.
No doctor could pinpoint why, exactly, things didn’t work out for us. There are multiple medical anomalies in my chart: an MTHFR mutation, a clotting disorder, seminal antibodies, competitive blood types, on and on. And yet, I could get pregnant at the drop of a hat. I did, actually, quite regularly, almost every three months for several years. （You can do the math on that. I know. It’s okay. It really is. As my beloved Hemingway said, we are all strong in the broken places.）
The irony, of course, is the medication I went on for both birth control and migraine suppression in the first place probably rendered me infertile. Or I always was, and all those years of prescriptions were pointless. I suffer from celiac disease, also a known contributor to infertility. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.
When we decided to stop trying, I turned to my own work and produced several books in a row I am deeply proud of, and only realized after the fact, several years removed, that I was sorting through my feelings in my work. Just read A Deeper Darkness, the first Samantha Owens novel, and experience the horror she does when she loses everything, and you will know my state of mind at the time.
I turned to my work, and it gave me power.
I turned to my husband, whose grace and love sustained me. He never blamed me, even when I blamed myself.
I turned to my faith, tattered though it was, and found peace.
I turned to yoga, and found the path to enlightenment that started with taking my first honest and true breath in many, many years to the backdrop of Jeff Buckley’s rendition of “Hallelujah.” There were tears. I was cleansed.
The idea of a story based on the inciting incident, as we writers like to call it, of my darling getting off in a tiny impersonal cubicle to the strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” to provide me with a slightly designer child, wouldn’t leave me alone.
And then, at last, came Olivia.
I knew her as surely as I knew myself. I have rarely been presented with such a wholly realized character—not since Taylor Jackson pulled an Athena and sprang fully formed from my head. I saw Olivia and knew her stories as if we’d been friends for years. She was walking down a beach, alone, arms wrapped around herself. She had just suffered a heart-wrenching miscarriage. She was so very, very sad. The line appeared in my consciousness: There was blood again.
It was finally time to tell her story.
I’ve said to my husband many times over the years that I often feel handicapped as a writer because I don’t speak the same language as so many of my peers. What Liane Moriarty did in Big Little Lies, for example, the language of the school pickup line—I didn’t have that in my repertoire. I wrote characters who had children sometimes, naturally. We don’t always have to experience things firsthand to write convincingly and honestly about them; I believe this in my soul. But there was always a little something I felt I was missing.
When Olivia demanded her story be told, I had a realization. I might not be able to write comfortably about what it’s like raising children, but I sure as hell could write about what it’s like to lose them.
This is the story of a woman who cannot bear a child, despite her many attempts. It is about a marriage broken by too many things to count. It is about the family we think we need, and the ways we survive the hardest parts of living. It is a tale of obsession and a tale of betrayal.
It is also a celebration. I hope to unmask and destigmatize—no, normalize—the conversation about infertility. I promise you, whether you know it or not, a woman very close to you has suffered a miscarriage. It is something so ubiquitous as to be almost commonplace, and yet it is rarely spoken about, and treated with such abhorrence and fear that it remains in the shadows, a dirty little secret too many of us are trying to hide. It’s horrible. It’s tragic. It’s happened to virtually every woman of childbearing age—some of them without even knowing it.