Under Review: The Lost Season: A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded of Women by Stacey May Fowles

 Motherhood is only one example of modernity’s social experiment. We all have things to do. The Lost Season is the companion for my guilt, doubt, fear, and regrets. This isn’t a self-help, feel good, do good, be good book. Rather the book is company for when I’m feeling bad. The honesty is refreshing. 

The title keeps no secrets. This book is a memoir of infertility, motherhood, and the worry and work demanded of women. However, for me, the book is not so much about becoming a mother, although of course it is that or a debate about whether or not you should have children. The book is a raw, rarely told distress story of what becoming a mother is really like, balanced by a writing style that does not grind, or expire into cliché but moves into the risky terrain of sharing specific feelings. “After having my daughter, I realized that it’s not so much that you have never known love — it is that you have not yet known the extreme capacity for loss.” 

Fowles delivers a reconciliation with a range of traumas most — if not all —women will recognize. The narrative moves in a tempo, not unlike the horror movies and the roller coaster Fowles embraces. “For as long as I can remember I’ve been drawn to being deliberately scared.” In this regard, Fowles writes, so we can hide. Words tense with expertise describe what we don’t want to look at, and yet Fowles tugs the pillow away with honest truth-telling. When she asks her daughter, “Do you know what helps me when I’m really scared?” and then a few sentences later explains that she has come to realize that “perhaps I am teaching her to scream,” Fowles is also teaching her readers to scream. 

The memoir begins with the taut period of infertility, and moves on to the despair of miscarriage, then there is the birth itself, followed by the pinch of anxiety when the baby is born. “Postpartum, it was as if every errant anxiety I had ever had in my entire life rose from dormancy and happily found a renewed sense of purpose,” Fowles explains. As she revisits her clinical anxiety disorder and sufferings with PTSD we learn of their adoption of a dog, and the illness of Fowles’s father. Near the end of the book we are reminded of a period when Fowles’s daughter was four months old and she was overwhelmed with the need to write. 

At times calm is restored as she learns to cook, and finds a comfortable place in the children’s library, but Fowles will return to episodes of despair or anxiety in different settings. Although I’d like to think we’d moved on, this repetition of feeling is much truer to real life where small gains of mental health are continuously pepper-sprayed by depression and defeat. Fowles is ruthless in her study of the discrepancy between male colleagues’ experience of parenting and her own. Suddenly there is no aspect of Fowles’s memoir that does not consider how anxiety has gripped her existence, and how the deepest challenge is to make sure this does not become her daughter’s life.

I learned in the first chapter this was not going to be a relaxing bedtime read. I had to sit up tall in the light of the afternoon and face hard truths. Fowles has done this her whole life, and she soon discovered her child demanded harder truths. Fowles is not the first to find herself unexpectantly forced into personal examination by getting the thing she most wanted. 

This book, along with Fowles’s many others, including the bestselling Baseball Life Advice, leaves no doubt she is a writer and that she must write like her child had to be born. Nature demanded both. Fowles delivers both. And although she repeatedly reminds us she has given up the urge to be a famous writer, her engaging style will make her one, “…each miraculous tiny exhale from her mouth proof that we had, in some otherworldly mystery, both made it to that dimly lit place together.” 

Fowles’s timeline is not chronological. We move back and forth in time so the complete story Fowles is telling can be told. In this memoir trauma is not simply infertility, or motherhood, rape or anxiety. The pages are the uncomfortable audience to a female human mammal that no more understands herself than the European naturalists understood the platypus pelt was not multiple animals stitched together. Fowles has managed to reconcile the intimate details of her body ravaged through no fault of her own, other than being born in an age that has complicated expectations of what a good life is. Although Fowles lost a season she becomes an intrepid natural explorer that has found the way.

My advice to Fowles is to keep the notes she stored in those early years of motherhood while holding on to impressions of her new life. All of this is going to happen again in late middle age. The secret discovery of growing old is not that you care less, but that you care differently. It turns out relinquishing an identity is not the end of the world, just the world you have known. Fowles is not wrong when she writes “One thing this toxic culture doesn’t teach us is just how powerful and healing it can be to simply surrender, give up, and let go.” Fowles’s happy ending is embedded in a new outlook on life that offers equilibrium.

The Lost Season: A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded of Women by Stacey May Fowles

McClelland & Stewart, 9 June 2026

208 pages

$34.00