Laughing IS Conceivable: One Woman's Extremely Funny Peek into the Extremely Unfunny World of Infertility: Lori Shandle-Fox

"This little ebook was written by a humor writer and former stand-up comic while she was in the shoes of her one fertility treatments -- uncertain of the outcome.  It has been downloaded by 1000s of fertility patients and professionals who believe that, even in this overwhelming, emotionally, mentally, financially, & physically draining time in a person's life, laughter really is the best medicine."


***I FINALLY get to post this review!  I originally wrote it on 12/18/17 and now, on 6/7/2019, I am finally allowed to post it!  When I read this book about a year-and-a-half ago, I had no idea I'd have to postpone this review for such a long time.  I picked it up right after we were told that the next step in our fertility process was IVF...and I was devastated.  I felt so broken, so useless, and so lost.  Why was conceiving no problem for so many and yet I was "unworthy"?  I was desperate (as was my husband) to find some way to cope with this all while maintaining the level of privacy I/we wanted to maintain throughout this infertility process.  This book is marketed to women in my situation.  Re-reading my review below, I didn't seem all that impressed.  I think, perhaps, I wasn't in a very receptive place (I was just downright angry and miserable), or maybe it was because I hadn't actually begun my own IVF process yet.  We didn't start prepping until early 2018 for what would turn into 2 IVF egg retrieval cycles.  Recalling what I do about this book, I think I would have appreciated some of it a lot more had I been going through IVF -- I don't know if I would have cracked up like some of the other readers did, but maybe I would have connected on a different level.  The book did do one thing:  it helped me not feel so alone.  I wasn't the only woman suffering through this and I won't be the last.  If you're more of a private person (like myself) and/or you don't have anyone close to you with whom you can share this experience or who can connect with you, then this is a good place to start.  It may help you feel just a little less lost and a little less hopeless.  Here is what I wrote back in 2017:

I’m planning on keeping this review private for the foreseeable future, mostly because reviewing this short book is a very personal revelation.  I picked up a little postcard advertising this book while in the waiting room at my fertility doctor’s office.  My husband and I have been trying to conceive since our wedding 1.5 years ago, but no luck.  I had a surprise PCOS diagnosis 1 year ago and, after countless tests, a surgery, monitoring, and numerous procedures, still no luck.  The last couple of months have been particularly stressful and painful for me and it seems only to be getting worse.  My poor, distraught husband has asked me to speak to someone about our difficulties in the hopes that it would make me feel better – for many reasons, I/we have decided to keep these issues private, if only to save ourselves from having to discuss every individual failure each and every time.  I feel it’s a very private matter and it’s no one else’s business.  Anyway, this book is supposed to be geared toward women in my situation; it’s marketed as having a sense of humor about the whole issue of infertility and all the crap we have to go through just to try to accomplish something our female bodies are supposed to do naturally.  Speaking first-hand, I can say this is a very personal, very raw, very difficult topic.  I was hoping that this book would do exactly what it was intended to do:  add some levity to the very serious and often heartbreaking situation of infertility.

This was a very quick read – much quicker than I thought it would be…I read it in less than 24 hours.  It was easy to read and well-organized.  While I found my mouth twitching at some of the scenarios and I highlighted several very relatable passages, it was not the crack-me-up, laugh-out-loud book I was hoping for.  Reading reviews on Amazon, it seems like the reviews are, for the most part, on very opposite sides of this spectrum.  People either cried from laughing so much, or they found it boring and filled with complaints rather than anything helpful or uplifting.  I am one of the rare middle-gounders.  I can sincerely appreciate what the author was trying to do.  It was reassuring to know I wasn’t alone in this (though I knew I never actually was, it was a way of seeing into someone else’s journey without feeling nosey or having to explain my own issues to put us on equal ground).  I didn’t crack up.  I think the closest I got was a small chuckle.  I think this could have been a much longer book; especially because it seemed like the author underwent a lot of treatment.  I get that it’s her choice to include as many or as few of her experiences as she wants, but I was given the impression that the book, itself, would have been longer.  I think it would have been more “helpful” had it been longer because she could have included more of her trials.  Maybe that’s just me.

Would I recommend this book?  I suppose.  I can see how it might help some women/people going through similar situations.  It does remind you that you're not alone, you're not the only one experiencing these feelings and this pain, but I did not experience the same solace other readers felt.  I say give it a go if you want!  Who knows?  Maybe it'll help you more than it helped me.  Happy reading (and good luck to all)!

The Queen of Hearts: Kimmery Martin

"A debut novel set against a background of hospital rounds and life-or-death decisions that pulses with humor and empathy as it explores THE HEART'S CAPACITY FOR FORGIVENESS...


"Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early twenties, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school.  Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers -- Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon.  Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years.


"As chief resident, Nick Xenokostas was the center of Zadie's life -- both professionally and personally -- throughout the tragic chain of events during her third year of medical school that she has long since put behind her.  Nick's unexpected reappearance at a time of new professional crisis shocks both women into a deeper look at the difficult choices they made at the beginning of their careers.  As it becomes evident that Emma must have known more than she revealed about the circumstances that nearly derailed both their lives, Zadie starts to question everything she thought she knew about her closest friend."


This book took me nearly a month to finish (as evidenced by my relatively long hiatus posting reviews on here), and this does not really bode well for a stellar review.  I will cushion this statement with the truth that I’ve been dealing with health issues and some personal/familial tragedy, so I’ve simply been unable to force myself to read all that much.  Granted, a brilliant book can be an escape from the rigors and draining nature of the real world, but the medical nature of this sotry had some rather poor timing in my personal life – this is, of course, not really the book’s fault.  I was initially drawn to it via yet another Pinterest search.  This was also a new release at my local library and all the pieces just seemed to fall into place.

I began reading The Queen of Hearts very shortly after I finished the book I reviewed just prior to this one.  I was immediately sucked into the fast-paced worlds of Zadie and Emma.  One of the biggest draws for me was the happy realization that it was set in Charlotte, North Carolina – where I happened to live for a year while attending college.  It’s always very entertaining to run across places with which you’re familiar; it breathes a special kind of life into a book.  An added bonus is that my uncle was a doctor in Charlotte as well, so I was familiar with the hospital and lives of these surgeons (I’ve yet to ask him if he’d ever worked with Dr. Kimmery Martin, the author).

The first part of the book had excellent pacing.  I was introduced to Zadie and Emma, the interesting nature of their friendship, and the very different lives they lead.  The pacing does change and I think that was part of my problem.  It began to feel a bit choppy.  Eventually, the story bounces back and forth from intense present events to the pivotal time in 1999 when Zadie and Emma were still medical students and tragedy struck.  They learned what it is like to be a doctor, and they also learned how to cope with their own mistakes and suffer through unexpected loss.  This use of perspective  – bouncing not only in time and space, but also between Zadie and Emma – sometimes got a bit more confusing than was pleasant.  There was a concerted effort to create a stark differentiation between the bubbly, scattered Zadie and ice queen Emma, but it fell short.  I lost their unique voices a few times in their different sections and had to go back to remind myself whose perspective I was reading.

The dark secret was, I thought, handled fairly  well.  Snippet after snippet was revealed, making me think, “There it is…  No, this has to be it!” several times.  When the real secret does finally come to light (in its entirety), it truly was deep and dark…and I can understand why she (I won’t tell you which “she”) did her best to cover it up all this time.  I must also admit that everything following the admission of the complete truth felt a bit rushed – literally the entire book led up to this moment and it wound up finishing before I got any real satisfaction from experiencing the aftermath.  The friendship between Zadie and Emma was so time-tested and the secret so powerful that I was left feeling a bit hollow at the end – the “resolution” felt a bit unrealistic to me.  This might come off as not making much sense, but I cannot give too much away without revealing huge plot twists (and I certainly don’t want to ruin those for you).  All said, I think I would have liked the “big reveal” to happen sooner, or to have more time to watch the characters absorb the truth.  The ending was tied up a little too quickly and neatly for my personal taste.

The medical aspects of this book – their lives as medical students and careers following some twenty years later – read a lot like “Grey’s Anatomy”.  If you’re a fan of medical dramas (complete will on-call room booty-calls), then you’ll enjoy this book.  I am a fan of “Grey’s” (especially the older seasons), so this was no trial for me.  In fact, it was part of the draw of this book.  So many people not directly in the medical field don’t realize what doctors – especially surgeons – go through on their path to their ultimate career.  It’s a life filled with exhaustion, stress, loss, triumphs, pain, and mental strain.  Reading about this from an author who is also a doctor was refreshing and very realistic.  I would be very interested to know just how many of the patients Zadie and Emma encounter in this book were borrowed from real-life experiences of Dr. Martin and her colleagues.

While I liked parts of this book, the rapid shifts in time and perspective sometimes left me a little bit lost.  Even with the impending revelation of the deep, dark secret, the latter half of the book dragged much more than the beginning did.  As I mentioned before, this was partly due to my own inability to focus, but I won’t take all of the blame here.  I think part of it was the writing style and then some of it was the addition of unnecessary details – especially in some of Zadie’s medical school flashbacks as they pertained to her group of friends.  I can see what Martin was attempting to achieve (again, sort of like the close-knit misfit group in “Grey’s Anatomy”), but I didn’t feel that it always necessarily added something.  Some passages could have been used for an entirely different book.  The ending of the story wasn’t as satisfying as I was hoping.  I liked the characters’ personalities and some of my favorite scenes were those between Zadie and Emma with their respective husbands; however, the voices sometimes blended together with all of the bouncing around.  Is this book worth trying out?  I would say so.  Do I give it a glowing recommendation?  Not necessarily.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, I just wasn’t as sucked in as I would have liked to have been.  I'm not totally sold by the forgiveness at the story's conclusion, but perhaps there's something to be said for the power of Zadie and Emma's relationship.

Happy reading!