Book Tour - Time Traveler’s Wife (Ann’s Responses) April 15, 2007

It’s time again for another Barren Bitches book tour (I participated in the last one where we discussed Children of Men). This time the book is The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This is one of my favorite books – how could it not be? One of the main characters is an academic librarian, and there are multiple scenes of him ending up naked in the library. Anyway. In my mind, it’s one of the best love stories that I’ve read. A true romance that just happens to involve involuntary time travel. And libraries.

Once again, Mel at Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters is organizing the book tour. You can hop along to another stop on this blog tour by visiting the main list of participants . You can also sign up for the next book on this online book club: Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein.

I also managed to convince Chris to join us, since I thought he’d really like the book. So he’s posting his answers to questions on my blog too. So if you’re looking for responses, take a look at both of our posts. We answered different questions.

If you were able to communicate with a past or future version of yourself, how much would you tell them? How much would you want to know? Discuss how well you think Clare and Henry struck this balance, giving examples of points and ways in which they conveyed or withheld information.

and

In the “TTW” the main character can at times, know what happens in the future, even though he can’t change it. In terms of infertility, I often wonder if I had been able to know what the end result of all this would be if I could be at peace with it, even if I couldn’t change it. How do you feel about that? If you could know what was going to happen sometime in the future in regards to your IF would you choose to know and not be able to change it, or continue the way you are and get to that place unaware of the final destination?

I’m answering these two questions as one. I’d like to think that I would not tell myself too much, that I do like being surprised and not knowing what will happen. But that’s not true. In reality, as soon as I get to a suspenseful part of a book, I have to look at the last page to figure out if a character survives or not. The thing is, I don’t need to know exactly what happens, just whether or not things turn out ok. I know that if I could have jumped ahead to find out if we would be successful in our attempt to conceive, I would have done that. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that, since we were in the end successful. I’m not sure though if I would have wanted to know if we hadn’t been successful. On one hand, knowing that, maybe I could have moved on, but I think I sometimes I cling too much to hope, even to my detriment (tragic optimist and all that). I’m not sure I would have accepted that as the truth if that’s what it really had been.

How did it change Henry and Claire’s relationship in that Claire always knew she would marry Henry, but Henry had no knowledge of Claire until they meet when he was 28? Why did the author choose to have their meeting set up this way, when Henry could have told his younger self about how he would meet Claire?

I think in some ways, it must have taken away a little of the stress that comes with really loving a person and hoping that they feel the same way and worrying that it might lead to being hurt. If you know that you end up happily married, then there’s less fear of giving up control and trusting the other person. But then, it must have been a little anti-climactic. One of the thrills of starting a relationship is not knowing exactly how it all turns out. It also led to Claire missing out on a lot of dating relationships before Henry. While I don’t pine for any of my past boyfriends, I am glad that I had those past relationships – even the bad ones – since they informed so much of how I interact with other people. I think it must have been horribly frustrating for Claire to know how things would end up with Henry, but having to deal with him still not knowing that.
“My body wanted a baby. I felt empty and I wanted to be full. I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always. And I wanted Henry to be in this child, so that when he was gone, he wouldn’t be entirely gone, there would be a bit of him with me.” For me, this quote encapsulates the incredibly complex and sad contradictions at the heart of the book. Henry is not truly there. It’s his time travelling which leaves Claire alone and at the same time causes her to miscarry. Her longing for a piece of him can’t be filled, as she can’t hang on to his child. Putting aside the perception of a child as someone who gives eternal love, I am taken by this image of the child as a reflection of the father. How do you feel about this? If you have used or considered donor gametes, has this been an issue for you or your partner? The loss of a genetic line, the acceptance that the child may not be “a part of” the parent? Is the grieving worse for the partner who does not use their own eggs/sperm, or for the other parent, who doesn’t get to hold onto a tiny piece of their partner? Or is the essence of a parent passed on regardless of the genetic link?

I agree that this passage really summed up a lot of the yearning that Claire experienced, and it really rang true for me. We never really experienced the possibility of needing to use donor sperm or eggs, but I think it would have been hard for both of us to come to terms with that. I know that there are parts of Chris that I had hoped for in a child and now look for in Zoe. It must be an even stronger urge when you know that your partner may not be around much longer, as Claire must have feared with Henry. It’s unfair for us to expect that our children be reflections of us, or to at least preserve a bit of us, but I think it’s a very human trait to want your children to be an extension of yourself and your partner. I don’t believe that genetics is the only way to see your partner in your child, but perhaps it’s the most easily recognizable? I know that I want my daughter to have her father’s curly hair (he disagrees with me on that).

Book Tour - Time Traveler’s Wife (Chris’s responses) April 15, 2007

As I mentioned, Chris read The Time Traveler’s Wife, too so he agreed to participate in the book tour this time around. Here’s his questions and answers. You can hop along to another stop on this blog tour by visiting the main list of participants . My post on the book is just below this one. You can also sign up for the next book on this online book club: Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein.

2. The present and future intersect frequently in the book. Often the result of these minglings is that information about the future is hinted at or revealed early but the actual experiences cannot be altered or prevented. If you could have known about the struggles you’d face on your path to parenthood, would you have wanted to know? Would you go back and warn or prepare yourself, even though you’d be powerless to change the outcome? Why or why not?

Yes, absolutely. When we first started trying to have a child, I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready for it, and after we’d been trying I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. Knowing the timeline would have helped with both of those uncertanties. Knowing that we would ultimately be successful, and being able to share that information with Ann, would have helped a lot. I would have been comfortable with a relatively broad range of results, but not knowing what would happen was extremely frustrating.
3. How do the characters deal with the sense of fate (knowing how the future plays out) vs. free will? Do you think they end up doing things because they already know they happen? Does that take the guesswork out or make it harder to accept?

I don’t think they do deal with it. There’s no real strong evidence that Henry’s right about his inability to change the future, and I spent much of the book yelling at him about it. I think they definitely take the path of least resistance.

6. I love the references to music in this book. They are a convenient way for the author to clearly define the era the narrative is taking place in, but for those of us who can’t time-travel, music and the times in which we listened to it play a powerful role in constructing memory. Which is to say, that it is almost impossible for me to think about our experience of infertility without thinking of “The Waters of March” as performed by Susanne McCorkle. Mel’s written about this in the past. I also think about going with Mel to see Bruce Springsteen concert right when we started TTC and just being so certain that there was a child in-utero at the concert with us. There wasn’t. Or not one that became a viable embryo. For that reason, I hardly ever listen to The Rising, which is the album Bruce was touring behind (The Seeger Sessions however is awesome and on regular rotation). That said, what are the songs you associate with your experience — even if they have nothing to do with IF?

Ben Folds’ “Still Fighting It” came out in 2001, and has always struck a chord with both Ann and I, especially while we were trying to have a baby. The part that struck her was

“Good morning, son
In twenty years from now
Maybe we’ll both sit down and have a few beers
And I can tell you ’bout today
And how I picked you up and everything changed
It was pain
Sunny days and rain
I knew you’d feel the same things

and both of us were struck by the chorus:

Everybody knows
It hurts to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here.
Let me tell you what
The years go on and
We’re still fighting it, we’re still fighting it
Oh, we’re still fighting it, we’re still fighting it

And you’re so much like me
I’m sorry

I was kind of a grumpy kid, and I’m a bit less grumpy now. I keep hoping our children will be more like Ann than like me, because I want them to be happy. But hey, at least I’m not unmoored in time, right?

The first piece of music that Zoe responded to was Michael Franti and Spearhead’s Yell Fire, which I bought right around the time she was born. I think that’s permanently associated with Zoe’s early birth and the days shortly after.

Barren Bitches Book Group - “Children of Men” by P. D. James March 5, 2007

A group of 16 bloggers who are or have struggled with infertility (including me) have read P. D. James’ “Children of Men” and are discussing the book on our blogs starting today. The book tells the story of a world where no children have been born since 1995 (the year becomes known as “Omega”). The worldwide infertility is due to all male sperm being completely dead. The book takes place 25 years after Omega as the world is has mostly given up on finding a cure and people are dealing with the fact that humanity will likely become extinct in about 50 years. Furthermore, as there is no younger generation, the last few years will become more and more chaotic, with no one around to provide basic services. The protagonist is Theo, an historian and the ruling Warden’s cousin. He is approached by a group that is trying to protect a woman, Julian, who has become pregnant so that she can give birth in peace.

The way the book group works is that after reading the book, all of us submitted questions (the list is here), and then chose five of the questions to answer on our blog today.

Intrigued by this book tour and want to read more about “Children of Men”? Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Tour by visiting the master list of participants at Stirrup Queens. Want to come along for the next tour? Sign up begins today for tour #3 ( “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger) and all are welcome to join along. All you need is a book and blog.

By the way, if you’re facing infertility, Stirrup Queens is a fantastic blog to visit to find others who are facing similar issues. Mel always has interesting posts, and she maintains a great list of blogs by subject.

So on with the book club thing…

5. In Chapter 7, Jasper Palmer-Smith says to Theo within a tyrade about society, “Now, for the rest of our lives, we’re going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, the annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed.”How do you feel about this statement? Do you agree in certain respects with it (and the rest of his statements, not quoted here)? Do you think this has become a true generalization of the youth in America today? If you have children now, how do you plan to raise your children so that this statement does not pertain to them? If you do not yet have children, how would you parent your children so that this description does not fit them?

I work at a college, and recently, we’ve been hearing all about these young kids coming in, what with their iPods and their instant messaging and their online gaming… “Kids these days, they’re so different than us, whatever will we do?” I’m pretty sure this is a universal statement that’s been going on forever, and I’m not a fan of that type of thinking. There’s certainly some truth to the intrusive barbarism of the young, if only because by definition they’re younger and have less experience with the world and still expect everything to revolve around them. I’m not even sure that there’s much parenting to be done to keep children from going through some of the less lovely aspects of youth. I expect that having your own child makes some of those traits much easier to deal with. I know a lot of people who say they can not stand children, except for their own. I do hope that we can raise Zoe to see Christmas as something other than a time of greed, and to not be violent, but I doubt I’ll be able to change her taste in music (which currently runs to the reggae side of things).

8. What do you think is the significance of the fact that the two people who are finally able to conceive are both considered “flawed?” (Luke had epilepsy and Julian had a deformed hand)

This was one of my favorite things about the book - the British government tests all the “healthy, unflawed” men and women of childbearing ages to see if any of the men are fertile, and to know which women are fertile just in case a fertile man is found. But by only testing “healthy, perfect” people, the British government missed the fertile man (possibly men) and the pregnant woman. It is so easy to think that we know what is best, who is flawed and even who should be allowed to reproduce. But maybe we aren’t always the best judges of what “best” means. I think it also points to the importance of diversity and against the idea eradicating everything that we consider to be flawed.

11. In describing the world’s “universal bereavement” over it’s lack of children, the narrator tells us, “Only on tape and records to we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young. Some find them unbearable to watch but most feed on them as they might a drug.” How is this like your life dealing with infertility? How do you cope when you are confronted with images or reminders that are painful to you?

Images and recordings were never quite as difficult for me as seeing actual babies. The hardest thing for me to deal with was when co-workers brought their children to work. I used to work for a company where there was someone (usually more than one) in our department who was pregnant for about 3 straight years. I feared that my pain and desire would be so obvious and transparent that everyone in the office would be able to see just how much I wanted a child. And yet, as soon as I heard the coos or cries of a baby, I’d be right there to see little cutie and his or her proud mother. I’d just stand back with my hands behind my back, trying desperately not to lunge forward and hold the child. Comparing it to a drug that I could not resist, no matter how much I wanted to, is extreme, but closer than I maybe want to admit.

12. In speaking of Theo’s preparation to attend the Quietus, the author says, “It had been his habit all his life to devise small pleasures as palliatives to unpleasant duties.” Do you have any habits or coping mechanisms that have a soothing effect on days that you expect to be unpleasant?

I love small pleasures - a good cup of hot cocoa can go a long way towards making a Monday morning tolerable, for instance (as I sip my cocoa). On unpleasant days or times when I need to do something that I’m not looking forward to, I give myself permission to do whatever it is I want. That has included everything from walking 3 miles to an art fair on a whim to eating two bowls of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream to spending the evening watching wonderfully bad TV - I’m looking at you, America’s Next Top Model. I had never really thought about it before, but I make something of a ritual of it, stepping aside from my daily activities and asking myself, “all right, Ann, what would make you feel better.” (I do talk to myself that way). It’s not so much one single thing that makes me feel better, but rather giving myself permission do something just for me. I learned and perfected that strategy as a way to cope with the disappointment of negative tests month after month.

16. One of the reason’s I suggested this book to Mel was because of a very thoughtful article in the NY Times by A.O. Scott comparing the film and the novel versions of Children of Men. Scott closes the article with a quotation by James speaking to the differences between what she normally writes — detective novels — and the world she created for Children…. She says, “The detective novel affirms our belief in a rational universe because, at the end, the mystery is solved. In Children of Men there is no such comforting resolution.” The conclusion she leads us to, of course, is that the universe is not nearly so rational, which I thought very aptly describes the world of IF. At the end of the novel, we really don’t know what will happen next — will they find a cure for the world-wide infertility crisis? Will totalitarian rule come to an end in England? Will Theo wield power more wisely than Xan did or will he fall victim to the same peril he saw in Rolf? The haze of uncertainty resonates as it does with parenting-after-infertility because it’s not all happily-ever-after when the wished-for child is born. Does anyone else identify with that? What does it take to deliver ourselves out from our own dystopias?

While at first I was a little annoyed that the book ended abruptly without much denouement, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked that ending. Since P. D. James named the second half of the book “Alpha,” or beginning, I took that to mean that there would be more children, and even if the crisis wasn’t completely averted, it wasn’t the end of humanity, but it isn’t going to be an rosy world, either. As someone who is just starting out on the parenting-after-infertility path, I think your comparison of the two is pretty apt. The fact that I have had a child has not cured my infertility, it has not answered all my questions, and while I’m very, very happy, I think happily-ever-after is somethin that never really happens, and there is still that shadow of infertility that shows up once in a while. I’ve struggled with feeling like I should just get over it, but it really is not that easy. Similarly, I cannot imagine that the birth of one child, or even many children, after 25 years of infertility will solve the crisis that P. D. James envisioned, I think that the many reactions, the chaos, and the desperation will have ramifications for generations. Infertility isn’t something that a person, or a world, can just “get over.”