No One Talks About This Stuff

Alongside Kat Brown, contributors include Alice Jolly ('Dead Babies and Seaside Towns'), Laura Barton (journalist and author of 'Sad Songs'), Seetal Savla (@savlafaire), Yvonne John (Gateway Women, 'Dreaming of a Life Unlived'), Alice Rose (@thisisalicerose, The Fertility Life Raft podcast) and Nana-Adwoa Mbeutcha (Black Mums Up Front podcast). In 2020, the journalist and writer Kat Brown was told, after years of trying and two IVF rounds, that it was unlikely that she would ever have a biological child of her own. Nothing had prepared her for this outcome. Suddenly, something that seemed to her a given - that she would one day have a family; that IVF would, eventually, work - was taken away. With that came a very particular kind of grief - a new language to navigate and an uncertain landscape to explore. She knew she was not the only person to have experienced this loss and yet it wasn't a loss she felt was publicly acknowledged. There were, she realised, many losses and griefs like this. She found that personal stories of IVF struggles, of trying for children but never conceiving, of choosing to have them or not, of miscarriage, of infertility, of baby loss, were hard to find. People endured, but how they endured was not something that was being shared, or passed down. In this anthology, she invites writers to explore how they navigated these losses, lives and in-between states, in order to reach out a hand to anyone needing it now and say, 'You have done so well, and you don't have to go through this alone.'