...an eye-opening, gorgeously written blend of memoir, reportage, and cultural analysis [which] breaks this taboo to powerful effect ... These are heavy topics. But Boggs broaches the political without didacticism and the personal without sentimentalism or self-pity.
[Boggs'] book is a corrective and a tonic, a primer and a dispeller of myths. It is likely to become a go-to guide for the many couples who discover that having children is not the no-assembly-required experience they were expecting. They will come away enlightened, reassured and comforted by her debunker mentality ... These discussions aren’t always earth-shattering. Some, like her rehash of the custody battle over Baby M, are downright rote ... Yet Ms. Boggs has done something quite lovely and laudable with The Art of Waiting: She’s given a cold, clinical topic some much-needed warmth and soul.
Boggs’s meditations on the politics of reproduction and ART are eloquent and impeccably researched. Ultimately, however, her prose is most luminous when she is limning the subterranean psychic toll that infertility takes on its sufferers ... a passionate and humane case for everyone’s right to choose and direct their own reproductive story.
Boggs is uninterested in creating suspense because her beautifully written, contemplative book — which blends memoir, journalism and cultural history — is about much more than her own costly and high-tech path to parenthood ... [Boggs] also reflects on the process of waiting itself, and she is at her most affecting when she ponders its agonies.
The Art of Waiting is not just an honest and heartbreaking account about Boggs’ experience. In addition to the endless medical options available to her and other women, she deftly examines the choices and challenges couples and singles face. She introduces us to people who have pursued domestic and international adoptions and how those families have fared. She delves into 'fertility tourism' to Nepal, Thailand and other countries, where the business of hiring surrogates is booming ... a primer for anyone dealing with infertility. It’s also an eye-opener for anyone who takes having children for granted.
In The Art of Waiting, the writer is struggling with infertility and visits her local zoo, where a gorilla is pregnant; she meditates on reproduction in human and nonhuman primate life, and on infertility as a state of 'waiting' ... This surprisingly unambitious approach to one of nonfiction’s richest traditions is where Boggs’s new book, a memoir that considers the larger subject of infertility, begins ...varied assumptions lack evidence and seem to contradict one another — but the essay hurries back to the writer’s own experience ... Too often Boggs avoids ideas that complicate the ideas she wants ...This book wants to offer empathy above judgment: to present a range of case studies and a difficult period in the writer’s life with a compassionate, even soothing reserve ...book’s language is often pamphlet-esque.
The Art of Waiting delves directly into the process of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in all its pre- and mis-conceptions, its prose like a sledgehammer cracking through drywall ... In a book that could easily become insular, instead the reader finds Boggs’s considered, holistic approach, wherein she covers families of numerous formations and facets — different races, socioeconomic categories, and world views pepper this intelligent and insightful treatise on fertility, medicine, and motherhood.
Boggs explicitly sets out to provide comfort for those struggling with infertility, but her book is also valuable as a corrective, sometimes contrarian, look at how we think about bodies and science ... Boggs writes incisively not only about the sacrifices and costs involved, but also about how access to treatment is not available to everyone equally ... this book shows that it’s possible to find new dreams and, even in the midst of long periods of waiting, to imagine new paths forward.
The first half of the book delivers, for the most part. Boggs offers an engaging and empathetic description of her inability to conceive, the way she felt personal failure ... in The Art of Waiting, these types of ethical considerations [the ethical imperitive of limiting reproduction] are largely superficial or left untouched ... The Art of Waiting for all of its intelligence and care and research isn’t invested in considering the broader cultural and ethical contexts of assisted reproduction, of whether or not this desire to have children should be fulfilled ... [it] lacks the interrogation and consideration of what it truly means to mother.
