Pitch

In Order for me to get Pregnant, my Protagonist had to do it First

Historians of witchcraft agree about one thing: writing about witchcraft will make you more superstitious. Strange coincidences, weird family connections, and odd outcomes abound. I thought it was weird enough when I discovered, years after the fact, that I was directly descended from a real life accused witch about whom I'd written an entire novel. But that was only the beginning.

I was three years into hardcore infertility treatment when it came time to write this novel, the follow up to my first witch novel. Like most first-time novelists, I wrote my first protagonist to be just a tiny bit too much like me. I wrote that book in grad school, and she was a grad student. We both are descended from executed Salem witches. We both spend a lot of our intellectual energy on the history of witchcraft and women in America. We are both brunette and kind of awkward. We both drove old beat up Volvos and we both had shaggy animals trailing along behind us wherever we went.

But our lives went in sharply different directions after that first novel came out. She become a professor, and I became a novelist. And when it was time to continue her story, for various narrative reasons it was imperative that she find herself pregnant at an inopportune time. Inopportune for her in her personal and professional life, and inopportune for me in that I was injecting myself four times a day with high octane chemicals amid ever-diminishing odds of success. At a moment in which much is being written about the challenges of being a writer and a mother at the same time, I faced the silent, invisible challenge of being a writer and a not-mother, and not by choice. I could give my protagonist what I wanted, whether she wanted it or not. But I had to face the truth that I probably would never have it for myself.

I wrote the book slowly, piece by piece, my protagonist grappling with the consequences of my choice for her personal life and her career, while I started yet another round of IVF, with its own consequences for my personal life and career. In the back of my mind, I thought maybe it would work in time for me to change the dedication of the book. My protagonist got more desperate. So did I. The manuscript went in, the dedication made, but not to a baby, as that round of IVF failed too. Things work out okay for my protagonist, though in ways shockingly different from what she expected. I told myself that they would work out for me too. That my life was good the way that it was, and that I could dump my invisible sadness on my protagonist as long as I wanted. If I couldn't control the outcome of my own life, I at least had some kind of say in hers.

It was after the manuscript revisions were all done, after the book was typeset, after the cover was picked, the acknowledgements written, and the dedication set in stone that my fifth, last ditch, hail Mary pass at IVF worked. I am about to leave on book tour six months pregnant, trying to come up with a way to talk about writing stories of witchcraft without succumbing to superstition.