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I did not sleep all night and when, the next day, the producer e-mailed to say that, yeah, that didn’t go so well and we’re not going to be able to use it, I felt nothing but a pure wash of relief. After the fact I likened it to a really awkward, inappropriately intimate job interview. I realized, around minute five, that there was a vast chasm between writing about something so very personal and talking about it with someone who I did not know and was, no matter how gentle, totally intimidating. I was nervous, inarticulate, and defensive. I went down to WBEZ (Chicago’s public radio station) and sat in a studio with a local producer and a set of headphones and talked for just under an hour with Terry Gross, in her studio in Philadelphia, about what it was like to accidentally get pregnant, to freak out, to try and figure out what to do, and then to have a miscarriage. So, despite some reservations, I said yes. Fresh Air, with a daily audience of 4.5 million public radio listeners, is the platinum ring of publicity-the platform to end all platforms, at least in the NPR-friendly corner of the culture. Now, when you’re a writer-or any sort of creative artist-and you are struggling to find your audience, to be seen and heard through the static, to make even some bitty mark on the world, you do not say no when Terry Gross comes calling. And I was invited to be a guest on Fresh Air. I was asked to contribute the piece to an anthology of writing on women’s rights. I got lovely notes from writers I admired. Women (and some excellent men) wrote to me publicly and privately to say thank you, and to share their own hard experiences with reproductive choice. I was stunned, and overwhelmed by the feedback I received. The essay struck a nerve with readers, and for a few days in early September, it seemed to go viral, taking over my friends’ Facebook feeds and eventually winding up on MetaFilter. But in an election season that saw women’s bodies-and the babies that can come from them-recklessly smashed around as part of some misogynistic game of political handball, it felt urgent.Īpparently I was not alone.
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I’m not a personal essayist by temperament or track record, and writing something so intimate and raw was unusual. Last summer I wrote and The Rumpus subsequently published a piece called “ Knocked Over: On Biology, Magical Thinking, and Choice,” an essay on my then-recent experience of first finding myself accidentally pregnant and then miscarrying at seven weeks.