The Lost Season
A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded of Women
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
One of Indigo's Most Anticipated Books of 2026.
The bestselling author of Baseball Life Advice, Stacey May Fowles returns with the honesty, humour, and heart that readers love in a memoir exploring infertility, motherhood, mental health, and the work demanded of women.
After years of struggling with the pain of infertility, Stacey May Fowles had her beautiful daughter. But while motherhood brought with it many joys, it also meant losing so much of what had gotten her through those years of wanting. With her characteristic introspection, Stacey May explores what it means to create life with a traumatized body, the sometimes uncomfortable fit of wearing both motherhood and ambition, and the ways in which our ideas of how a mother moves through the world limit and hurt us—and often sever our connections to one another.
The follow up to Baseball Life Advice, a Globe and Mail and National Post best book, The Lost Season is a raw, powerful exploration of undoing and becoming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and novelist Fowles (Baseball Life Advice) delivers a poignant and vulnerable collection of essays on conceiving and motherhood. She chronicles her experience battling infertility for four years before getting pregnant and giving birth to her daughter. As a freelance writer, maternity leave meant pausing work and relying on her husband's income, which she calls "a privileged but also deeply humbling experience." When a writer friend jokingly asked if she was going to write about motherhood, poking fun at the writerly impulse to document unoriginal experiences, Fowles felt ashamed and then began to reflect on how society touts motherhood as the most important thing a woman can do while simultaneously demanding she not speak on its realities. Essays on her challenging, 27-hour-long labor, which left her convinced her body was at fault; the dismantling of her home office ("a hallowed room of one's own") to make room for her daughter's arrival; and the fear she would unwittingly pass on her general anxiety to her child ("I didn't want her to keep the vibrancy of life at a safe distance") elucidate the loneliness and doubt that accompany the "incredible, miraculous, beautiful, spiritual, elemental, animal" experience of motherhood. Brutally honest and eloquently crafted, this will resonate with new and aspiring parents.
