Mine – When is Enough, Enough? – From the author of Geraniums Marlene Hauser
Inspired by the author’s own experience of infertility and adoption, ‘Mine’ is a compelling, hopeful, and moving book about the lengths some women will go to in order to be a mother.
High-powered Sophie Taylor thinks baby-making can happen on the fly. Managed alongside work, marriage, an MBA and travel, she decides to launch Project Bébé. Successful at everything, Sophie expects and always scores one hundred per cent. That is until the shocking failure of one fertility treatment after the next.
As the heartbreaking reality of infertility sinks in, Sophie owns up to another almost unspeakable loss and faces difficult decisions when she’s targeted as the love interest of a high-powered financier. Through a colleague, a mother of four, she learns that motherhood is not all it’s cracked up to be. Just as Sophie feels satisfied with the advantages of a childfree lifestyle, a fateful meeting changes everything…
Triumphant, joyous, and full of hope, Mine is a captivating story about a less understood route to motherhood: the fertility option Sophie almost forgot.
Author Hauser Marlene says, “I went through my own experience of fertility treatments. Later, I met a young woman on a plane who mentioned that she intended to wait another five years to have a baby; I explained my experience to her, and like myself, she was totally unaware of fertility parameters etc. I have heard this story repeatedly, with women thinking that they can wait forever, or certainly into their forties, and this spurred me to write about the subject.
When speaking to specialists, the idea of adoption came up multiple times, and it’s such an overlooked and viable option. Ultimately, I myself chose to adopt, and it was miraculous, to say the least!”
MINE, while fiction, was inspired by true events, from Marlene’s life and the lives of others. It is about almost “missing the boat,” and very nearly missing the opportunity to be a mother. So many women buy into the idea that they could have it all: education, career, marriage, children. For many, it has worked out, but for others there seemed to be a lack of understanding about fertility—that it did not go on forever.
A woman’s best chance of a natural pregnancy is in her twenties. Basic biological facts say conceiving naturally in your twenties and having an easy birth are attributed to youth. Clearly, this is a tough reality for women, as many are in further education or just getting started on their career in their twenties, and like it or not women have somewhat been sold a bill of goods that they “can get pregnant whenever.” Is it heresy to say this might not be strictly true, or that conceiving might be tougher than expected?
Marlene wrote MINE because one day, sitting on a plane, while in her mid-forties she met a woman who was 36. They discussed many things as you do on a long flight. She mentioned her impressive education, her work, and the fact that she wasn’t quite ready for kids, had found the right guy, but wanted to put it off for a few more years. I wanted to jump up and shout: “Don’t you know the facts?” The odds of getting pregnant at 36? There’s a 15% chance per cycle according to whattoexpect.com. By 40 it drops to 5%, and by 45 forget a natural pregnancy, maybe even an assisted pregnancy, which some say for a vast majority has a 0% chance.
Her fellow traveller said she was considering freezing her eggs. Marlene didn’t want to bark again about drugs and side effects. She didn’t want to say anything about the quality of her partner’s sperm; a recent review of medical literature claims that sperm counts have declined across the world over the last 50 years by more than 50% (CNN.com). She shared some of her fertility stories, and she said, “You’ve got to write about this,” and so she did. The result is MINE, with of course its happy ending.
Marlene is a professional writer based in Oxford, UK where she lives with her husband and teenage son. She is an American author of three novels: Mine, Geraniums and Off-Island.
Marlene’s novels fit into the category of commercial women’s fiction with a literary twist. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York. Marlene holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and has received numerous awards, including a residency at the Millay Arts Colony in Upstate New York.
Poppy Watt