WRITING EXAMPLES

The NoMo Book Club

​

By Lisa Kissane

 

This is a story about how books and community helped me claw my way out of grief.

 

Around christmastime of 2014, I was diagnosed with Primary Ovarian Insufficiency, also known as Premature Menopause. I was twenty-nine. 

 

My husband and I had been trying to have a baby of our own and for the next few years we continued to try in earnest to conceive. We exhausted every avenue and explored every option until early 2019 when we finally accepted that we couldn’t carry on. My self-worth was being slowly eroded with every negative pregnancy test. I was emotionally exhausted and felt broken; I had no clue of my place in the world if I wasn’t going to be a mother. It began to feel as though the infertility community was no longer serving me in the way I needed. Each time I logged on to Facebook there was a new TTC (trying to conceive) thread, or an image of a test strip showing a single stark stripe along with the question, "Can anyone else see a second line?" Instead, I began to look for role models; other childless women like me who could show me how to embrace the grief of involuntary childlessness and find wholeness. 

 

Finding My Tribe

 

In the months that followed, I felt myself changing irrevocably. They say that having children changes you, but the opposite can also be true. Knowing I would never have my own baby changed me more profoundly than anything else I've ever experienced. I desperately needed people around me who understood, and soon I found a thriving childless community online; and this in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic which effectively trapped everyone at home for over a year in England. Unexpectedly, I found myself at home with nothing to do but think and talk to the new friends I was making in this thriving online world of Women Like Me. A lifelong bookworm, I also found comfort in books as I always had done, but something else had changed. I'd developed an acute awareness of motherhood and fertility tropes in the pages of much-loved novels and felt unrepresented and invisible. It felt as though my trusty companion had turned on me and kept throwing my shattered dreams back in my face, often adding little value to the story and even sometimes on the very last page. Here, a successful round of IVF; there, another 45 year old woman becoming accidentally pregnant to round off a ‘finding peace’ plot. With every miracle baby ending, my confidence and courage faded along with my ability to imagine a life for myself that would be fulfilling and joyful without a child. I was so grateful that I now had this incredible community of women in my laptop who were just like me in the most fundamental of ways. Ever curious, I spoke at length with other women (and some men) about their own relationships with literature and how the awareness of their own childless future had affected the way they engaged with books and storytelling. It was bittersweet to learn that I wasn't alone in my observations, and with 18% of women in the UK reaching the end of their childbearing years without children (ONS, 2019), it became clear that the lack of fair representation of women like us in fiction was a problem. 

 

Representation is important

 

It is a universal truth that human beings need to be seen. For some, that might mean being the centre of attention; for others, being available to those in need; for others still, simply knowing that someone else on this planet sees them, warts and all. It’s also a sad truth that within many genres, literature has a shocking lack of childless representation, particularly in novels where heroines are over 40. Maybe there’s a rule that if a character undertakes fertility treatment, they must subsequently become parents. The startling truth is that less than a third of IVF cycles result in a live birth (NHS, 2018) - and that’s in the youngest age groups; as women get older these figures drop drastically. Think of the fact that in movies, if we are shown a gun, it must be fired later on. This can promote toxic positivity in the real world, which has the potential to be devastating for the recipient. Well-meaning friends and family often find it difficult to know what to say to a person who has been unable to have children and there are many others who never even got the chance to try. Platitudes such as, “You can always adopt”, and “It will happen when the time is right” reinforce the idea that if a woman has ‘failed’ to have a child, she is somehow lesser.

 

Happy ever after

 

There are hundreds of thousands of women across the globe who do not have children and the reasons for this are as varied as they are. It was for this reason that, feeling bolstered and supported by my tribe, I founded The NoMo Book Club. NoMo means 'not mothers'; a term coined by Jody Day, the founder of the Gateway Women website and community (Gateway Women, 2021). The NoMo Book Club is a virtual place (in the form of a website and social media presence) where I celebrate the books I read that recognise childless women and portray them as strong, resilient, valued. Not every happy ending has to include a baby; my friends in the childless community are testament to that. Through talking about books with my peers, I found I began to heal, slowly at first, and after many years of darkness I was able to see the light again. My life had meaning and purpose; I was invested in something that was beneficial to others and was helping women who had fallen out of love with books to safely dip their toe again, comforted by the knowledge that the things they feared would not ambush them. Society is changing rapidly in this age of information and to be heard by the masses someone must write our stories and allow us to control our narrative. Not every childless woman is a grumpy old dragon. Childlessness does not have to equal bitterness. In a hundred years when my generation of childless friends are all long gone, I hope that the conversations I’ve had through The NoMo Book Club will leave the legacy of knowledge. We existed. And we thrived.

 

Author Bio:

 

Hi, I’m Lisa Kissane and I’m the founder of The NoMo Book Club. I love to read, spend time in my garden and write. My favourite book ever is Northern Lights by Philip Pullman and if I’d had a daughter she would have been as fierce and brave as Lyra Silvertongue.

​

Published in edition #6 2020 of Oh Reader magazine