My book is out this week!

My book – Life, Almost: Miscarriage, Misconceptions, and a Search for Answers from the Brink of Motherhood – is published on Thursday. I can hardly believe it.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about sharing it with the world (as I tried to express in my most recent newsletter). And yet, at the same time, I also cannot wait for this book to exist. I hope people buy it and read it (You can still pre-order it here, which really does make a big difference to authors by getting booksellers to sit up and pay attention, to stock the book, to place it prominently in shops, that kind of thing…)

Life, Almost is a book that contains pretty much everything that happened on the road to having a baby. It’s a book about miscarriage, yes, but it’s also about fertility, reproductive medicine, and pregnancy more broadly, especially the many gaps in our knowledge. It’s a book about how society treats miscarriage – or, more to the point, doesn’t treat miscarriage. It’s a book about pregnancy after loss, and about mental health.

It’s also a book that started as a blog. This blog. So if you’re reading this now, please know that this book exists because of you. Thank you.

The book is my personal story of recurrent miscarriage, but it’s also interspersed with expert interviews and research findings – everything I’ve learned since I started this page, nearly six years ago now, that I think might be useful to know to someone in the thick of it (and also eye-opening for anyone who has not had to go through it themselves). I wanted to write a book that showed why this subject really matters, far more than society currently allows for. I wanted to show how much better we need to do; how much more there is to learn.

I didn’t write this memoir because I think my story is especially extraordinary. Writing this blog, reading the comments, and receiving the most heartfelt and thoughtful emails in response is proof of precisely the opposite. Therefore I wanted – needed – this book to be so much bigger than me and my story. There are millions, literally millions, of miscarriages that happen every year. Many could be prevented. Yet we’ve barely begun to acknowledge and understand this experience.

I really, sincerely hope this book makes a difference.

The last photo here shows the dedication page of the book.

For all the ‘almosts’ – Mine and yours.