Waiting for Daisy - Peggy Orenstein

Buffeted by one jaw-dropping obstacle after another, Orenstein seeks answers both medical and spiritual, all the while trying to save a marriage threatened by cycles, appointments, procedures, and disappointments. Her journey takes her around America and as far as East Asia - on the way she visits an ex-boyfriend who now has fifteen children; encounters 'parasite singles' in Tokyo, women who are rejecting marriage and motherhood in favour of shopping sprees and foreign travel; and shares stories with survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

The world's professional women are only now beginning to become aware of the risks and realities of 'having it all', and Orenstein's saga unfolds as infertility is developing into a boom industry, with over a million women a year seeking treatment. Waiting for Daisyis a profoundly honest, wryly funny report from the front, a story about doing all the things you swore you'd never do to get something you hadn't even been sure you wanted; it's about being a woman, about trying to become a mother, and above all, about the ambivalence, obsession and sacrifice that characterises the struggles of so many modern couples.

Peggy Orenstein is the author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gapand Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, her work has also appeared in USA Today, Elle, Vogueand the New Yorker, among others. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Steven Okazaki, and their daughter, Daisy.

'This may be the most honest book written about the tsunami of emotion that hits women when what should come most naturally - reproduction - becomes instead one vast, expensive science experiment … Daisy is a fine meditation on what it means to live a fulfilled life'
People

'Orenstein has written a memoir, a confession, a polemic and a love story all at once, describing the most frantic and confusing period of her life with clarity and candour'
Los Angeles Times

'By the time I reached the end of the book, I was crying into my latte … Orenstein's memoir is not just hers; it is the story of a generation of women who dared to wait for motherhood'
More

'If any writer has the verve and tenacity to supersede the typecasting of Mommy Lit, it's Orenstein'
Washington Post