22 March 2021
In February 2020, at a book party in a Brooklyn brownstone, a smiling stranger walked up to me. "We have something in common, you know," she said. "We conceived our children without having sex." My memory of the exchange then goes blank for a moment - I must have spluttered some confused pleasantry in response - but it quickly emerged that she had read my first novel, which explores its protagonist's struggles with infertility, and drawn the conclusion that I myself had undergone I.V.F., as she had.