Belle Boggs’s The Art of Waiting sets her own struggles with infertility within a larger framework of sociological, cultural, biological, and literary attitudes toward reproduction and motherhood. In this excerpt, she explores “Baby Fever,” the longing have a child that sent many of us on our infertility and adoption journeys.
Belle Boggs
Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The Art of Waiting is shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O the Oprah Magazine. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, Slate, Orion, Ecotone, and other publications, and she teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.