Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost, and Found, Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos (2009)

I’m glad someone wrote this book so I don’t have to. The publishing industry spews out dozens, if not hundreds of titles a year that wind up with Baby and Happily Ever After, but there's nothing for the large minority – or maybe it’s actually a majority? -- that the fertility industry has failed.

This book tells it like it is – but can a book that ends without a baby have a happy ending? A resounding yes.

Like the author, I also wound up without children, though due to different circumstances. The private loss is one thing, but the social stigma magnifies it hundred times.

The sad cases of Octo-mom and Jon and Kate have brought home to the wider world that fertility isn’t necessarily a thing to be admired in itself.  I hope his book is the beginning of a sea change in a baby-frenzied culture.

Silent Sorority does a great job addressing the invisibility of non-Moms -- the author identifies as Infertile -- but women who wound up without for other reasons will also relate. Why is 70% of all public conversation kid chatter? Where did manners go?

I hope this book brings some awareness to wider society that there's a pretty large group of people out there who aren't just being marginalized, but often maligned simply because they couldn't/didn't reproduce.

This book is snappy, funny, and irreverent as well as moving. The author takes us through the steps of shock, grief, hope, anger, denial and acceptance. The denial part really hit home with me -- you kind of have to park yourself there for a while, it takes some time to accept your fate.

What this book thankfully doesn't do is tell you "six easy steps" -- or how to "fix your attitude" to your childless state. Thank God! For me it was much better to hear the inside thoughts of someone who's gone through the same, or similar trials I have, and how she's found a way to be in the world.