Early in Katherine Brabon’s fourth novel, one of her two protagonists, a woman named Vera, turns to the internet for advice on falling pregnant. Among the articles and advertisements suggesting “surely miraculous” remedies, she finds something similarly potent with promise: stories.
In reading the social media posts of others “who had tried and struggled and then ultimately succeeded, as the phrase went, in having a child”, she finds “everything she asked for, except the specifically subjective story she wanted – which is to say: what could she do, just Vera herself, to make it certain?”
