In Her Own Sweet Time; Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood

xii, 324 pages. Notes. Index. Signed by the author on the title page The dust jacket has slight front corner bump. Rachel Lehman-Haupt is an award-winning science writer and expert on the future of family life, career timing, and the influence of science and technology on fertility, pregnancy, and family. Kirkus Reviews wrote her first book, In Her Own Sweet Time, "gracefully combines a revealing, engaging memoir with admirably nuanced social commentary." The age of motherhood is on the rise across the developing world. As a result, many women and couples increasingly rely on new choices and science to create their families. This includes advanced reproductive technologies like egg freezing, invitro fertilization, the use of donor eggs, gestational carriers, and the option to become a DIY mom or dad, a phrase Lehmann-Haupt coined. Lehmann-Haupt has been profiled by the Chicago Tribune for her practical and brave choice to freeze her eggs when she was thirty-seven and has been quoted in the New York Times. She has appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, the Wall Street Journal’s Lunch Break, and Bay Area Focus, speaking on the topic. In her writing and public speaking, she gives a personal face to and offers life strategies for the most relevant social trends that intimately affect women’s lives. Lehmann-Haupt’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Newsweek, Slate, New York, Vogue, Outside, Wired, Business Week, and Neo.Life. She is also the founder of StoryMade Studio. a boutique storytelling and editing studio. At thirty-one, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt thought she had everything: a great boyfriend, an exciting career, and the promise of marriage and children in her future. But the relationship ended and she found herself consumed by a rapidly approaching deadline: age thirty-five, the time at which most pregnancies are deemed ''high risk.'' Lehmann-Haupt traveled around the world and into the heart of America to explore the latest fertility choices available - as well as grapple with her own ambitions, anxieties, and personal values. A witty, poignant, and profoundly honest account of one woman's efforts to reconcile modern love with modern life, In Her Own Sweet Time resonates with a generation that wants it all - career, family, the perfect partner - but one that hasn't yet figured out how to fit it all together. Derived from a Kirkus review: The executive editor of Plum, a magazine for pregnant women over 35, considers the myriad choices available to women who want children but haven’t found Mr. Right. Lehmann-Haupt’s first book is a personal documentary; she presents statistics, interviews and analysis alongside her own story. She began research on the reproductive options for single women when she was 32, after a relationship she thought would lead to marriage and children ended. The book follows her through a six-year journey: fertility tests, online dating escapades, a serious relationship with a guy who couldn’t commit, sperm-donor shopping and finally oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) at the NYU Fertility Clinic. She interviewed mothers who were single by choice, the Italian doctors who invented the egg-freezing procedure, marketing executives from the company Extend Fertility, "bio dads" who donate sperm and "insta-couples" who decide to get pregnant within a year of meeting and aren’t embarrassed by a baby bump under a wedding gown. Most of the stories are positive, but Lehmann-Haupt doesn’t try to sell happy endings. Many of the procedures, including in vitro fertilization, embryo freezing and intrauterine insemination, are so physically, emotionally and financially draining that one single woman’s doctor asked her why she didn’t just have unprotected sex with a friend. The author actively reflects on important questions brought on by this modern reproductive landscape: How old is too old? Would she want her child to meet his half sisters on a donor sibli.…