This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Tuesday, June 12, 2007:
Tonight I went to a great reading at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. Several of my friends are contributors to this anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, and they were among the six writers who read excerpts from their memoirs of miscarriage.
Editor Jessica Berger Gross read from the introduction and how she looked high and low for a book to help her after her own miscarriage -- there really wasn't one about women's experiences from their point of view, so she created one here.
Caroline Leavitt's excerpt dealt with her insensitive coworkers who said the most thoughtless things and her friend who came up with the perfect antidote; Andrea (Andi to me) Buchanan's, about the loss of her son's twin brother, and about the feeling of having a dead fetus as well as a living one inside her; Rachel Zucker (whom I know as poet-in-residence at Fordham, where I teach), her 12-day-old son wrapped around her, read about her miscarriage; my Readerville friend and fellow Rockawayite comic novelist Rochelle Jewell Shapiro read about the events leading up to hers, namely her courtship and marriage proposal by her husband Bernie (sitting next to me); and finally, Susan O'Doherty (to me, the one and only "Dear Dr. Sue") read about the aftermath of a twenty-year siege of miscarriages, the nearly unbelievable birth of her son Ben, now 12, who was eating a pumpkin scone with his father at the table beside mine.
We also had an interesting and productive discussion after the readings. Anyway, if you know anyone who's had a miscarriage or want to understand what women go through when they do have one (and why the absolute stupidest thing you can say is, "Some things weren't meant to be"), get About What Was Lost. And even if you're not that interested in the topic now, the writing is so good you will be once you get started.
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