Miscarriage

I Had a Miscarriage

Jessica Zucker · 2021

Unlike most books on this list, which address pregnancy loss broadly, Zucker’s memoir is about miscarriage specifically, written by a psychologist specialising in reproductive mental health who miscarried at sixteen weeks and went on to found the #IHadAMiscarriage movement. She is unflinching about the silence and shame that still surround this particular loss, and offers, in their place, language that finally fits.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Elizabeth McCracken · 2008

McCracken’s memoir about her stillbirth — technically beyond miscarriage, but grief-kin to it — is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing about pregnancy loss ever published. She is funny, specific, entirely un-falsified in her grief, and she writes about what it is to mourn someone that much of the world does not quite count. It has become essential reading for bereaved parents, and for the people who love them.

I Will Carry You

Angie Smith · 2010

Smith’s account of carrying a pregnancy to term knowing the baby would not survive combines raw honesty about the grief with a faith framework that offers genuine comfort to readers who share it — and reads with enough humanity to be useful to those who do not. For readers whose miscarriage grief is tangled up with questions of faith and meaning, Smith holds those questions without rushing toward resolution.

Empty Cradle, Broken Heart

Deborah L. Davis · 1991

Davis wrote this specifically for parents who have experienced pregnancy and infant loss, and it remains one of the most compassionate and practically useful guides available — covering not just the immediate grief but the longer experience of grief that changes shape over months and years. It is particularly useful for understanding why the grief is as large as it is, and for giving others language for what to say.

Sunshine After the Storm

Alexa Bigwarfe, ed. · 2013

An anthology of essays by women who have experienced pregnancy loss — miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death — each one honest about a different aspect of the grief and its aftermath. For readers who feel profoundly alone in this particular loss, the collective voice of this anthology demonstrates that they are not.

Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell · 2020

O’Farrell imagines the life of Shakespeare’s wife and the death of their young son, Hamnet, with such physical, maternal precision that the loss feels entirely contemporary despite the Elizabethan setting. It is not a novel about miscarriage specifically, but its portrait of a mother’s grief for a child the world quickly moved on from is unflinching and, in its way, deeply validating.

Motherhood

Sheila Heti · 2018

Heti’s genre-blurring novel circles, with relentless honesty, the question of whether to have a child at all, including the not-quite-pregnancies and false starts that rarely make it into fiction. It gives unusual, thoughtful space to the ambivalence and uncertainty that often surround pregnancy loss, rather than resolving them into something tidier.

Ashes & Wildflowers

Georgia Clare

Georgia Clare’s own poetry collection gathers poems for grief, heartbreak and the quiet courage to begin again. Short, tender and easy to return to, it is a gentle companion for the hardest stretches.