Brotherhood of Joseph: A Father's Memoir of Infertility and Adoption in the 21st Century Book

"Just because the male experience of all this sort of thing--of fatherhood not 'naturally' come by--is a subtle one, and just because it doesn't often get expressed, that doesn't mean there isn't something worth expressing: what it feels like to be caught up in this blur of plastic cups and paperwork, committed by love, by vow, and by faith in some Divine Order that there is a plan. . . . We lower our shoulders and muscle through, often quite unpleasantly, trying to figure out how to cope, how to pay, how to laugh, how to change, how to be the man in a situation that simply did not exist in ten thousand years of human history prior to 1981."
--Brooks Hansen

It has been a while since I started a book I couldn't put down, especially one I was reading for research purposes (for my forthcoming book on infertility grief in couples). Although I have not read Hansen's fiction, for which he is better known, his memoir is one of the most candid, memorable, and literary-quality autobiographical works I've read in recent memory.

The male experience of infertility is a largely untold (and understudied) story. In our society, even in religious circles, we tend to feminize the struggle of childlessness in ways that leave men out of the equation. By this account, Hansen would have widened our perspectives of infertility by writing even the most blase, underwhelming memoir. But by opening up and writing something that was truly quality work, he shares something with us that is not only important but pleasurable to read.

Halfway through the book, Hansen tells of the struggle to write in the midst of the emotional and logistical challenges of infertility treatment. Many times, he felt like he was failing as a writer. But, eventually concluded, "[i]f you don't on some level feel that you're failing your material, you should probably go find some new material." I, for one, am grateful he didn't go find some new material--that he stuck with what was hardest to write, and succeeded.