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Start giftingReproduction
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“Louisa Hall’s novel is a lacerating commentary on conception, pregnancy, and motherhood in the United States today. Her protagonist is writing a novel about Mary Shelley while trying to conceive a child. Her enigmatic friend Anna, a geneticist, wanders in and out of her life, leaving havoc in her wake. The book is written in three parts - 'Conception' draws parallels between the narrator’s and Shelley’s frustrations in conceiving and childbearing; 'Birth' is a feral howl of pain describing the excruciating birth of her daughter; 'Science Fiction' lays out her consternation with Anna’s genetic meddling in her own attempts at conception. The parallels to Frankenstein will be lost on no one. While it is thematically similar to Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s luminous A Ghost in the Throat,, it lacks that book’s urgent poetic drive. Still, it is a complex, feminist examination of the ongoing struggle for bodily autonomy, and thus a timely read.”
— Grace • Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry
A lucid, genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a country in crisis
A novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist’s own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of an old friend who mysteriously reappears in her life.
In telling a story that ranges from pregnancy to miscarriage to traumatic birth, from motherhood to the frontiers of reproductive science, Louisa Hall draws powerfully from her own experiences, as well as the stories of two other women: Mary Shelley and Anna, a scientist and would-be parent who is contemplating the possibilities, and morality, of genetic modification.
Both devastating and joyful, elegant and exacting, Reproduction is a powerful reminder of the hazards and the rewards involved in creating new life, and a profoundly feminist exploration of motherhood, female friendship, and artistic ambition.
Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals. She is a professor at the University of Iowa, and the Western Writer in Residence at Montana State University.