Goodreads asked Laura Catherine Brown:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Laura Catherine Brown I read an article in the paper about a woman who carried her daughter’s baby to term. Grandmother Is Mother Until Birth, I think was the headline. This was last century, as they say, in the mid 1990s. The concept stayed in my mind because the article was bare-bones, and focused on the technology, not on the characters, which gave me space to wonder how it would be for a daughter to need her mother in this way, how would it feel to be so indebted? I wondered what kind of person the mother was. Was she devoted, or domineering? Perhaps both? This situation, a mother-daughter surrogacy, while not as currently commonplace as surrogacy in general, has since occurred numerous, maybe countless times. Surrogacy, in general, despite the incredible expense and medical intrusion, and despite the upending of normal daily lives and bodily integrity seems so common now, we barely acknowledge it. At the same time, it seems like a dystopian fantasy. When I read the article in the 90s, surrogacy was a rare enough occurrence to appear on national news. I drew on my own life, too. I had not particularly wanted children, but I found myself in my late 30s, having fulfilled a dream of publishing my first novel with Random House, thinking maybe motherhood was possible. I had a loving husband and a good job, why not children? Growing up, I’d been instilled with the belief that children were a trap and a curse, but I began to realize in my 30s that children were a gift, and that I did not have to repeat the chaos of my own upbringing. Also, I had lived through two earlier baby booms among my friends, neither of which I’d wanted any part of. The first happened after high school graduation when many of my classmates married and started families. The second happened after college some years later. Both times, I had zero interest in joining the motherhood tribe. My life was unsettled, unformed, and I was single. But this third baby boom was the now-or-never people who’d put off their childbearing for career or graduate school or any number of life’s detours. Many friends who got pregnant around this time had actually been trying for several years, and finally it happened. So, my husband and I stopped trying not to get pregnant. When nothing happened, we visited fertility specialists and took workshops. We tried IVF and failed. Ultimately, we could not have children. I came to terms. But it was during this “trying” time that I was writing this book, and I think writing helped me make sense of the emotional turbulence, the grief and feeling left out of life. Writing gave me a focus that wasn’t revolved around follicle stimulation, ovulation and sperm motility. It allowed me to feel that the long, arduous, expensive journey had not been a complete waste of time and money, and that I was more than an abject failure of a woman. I was a writer, a creative person, someone who might have something to say. What I learned through the medical journey is that even with all our technology and scientific breakthroughs, at the heart of conception and birth is a mystery and a miracle. Why does a woman who couldn’t conceive for years, finally, after numerous IVF procedures, become pregnant and give birth to a daughter? How is that she subsequently becomes pregnant again without any medical intervention? There are theories about how the body learns on a cellular level. But no one really knows. So, I wanted also to convey the mystery, the animal nature of all of us, the ancient fertility rites and belief systems we all collectively carry.

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