I was at a point in my life where I was trying to get pregnant and having trouble doing so, but also having this kind of parallel conversation with myself, just wondering how much I’d unconsciously inherited about, ‘well, in order to feel fulfilled, this is what I should do.’” “I think the initial spark came from my own questions and struggles around motherhood and fertility. “I started writing it around 2010, actually,” she told me. But Zumas started writing the novel years before Trump was elected. This year has already seen its first attacks on the organization, with Tennessee congressional candidate Jimmy Matlock calling for defunding. The connections to our current administration are certainly there: the bill that Republicans proposed last summer to replace the Affordable Care Act would’ve barred Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds for one year. But the current administration does not support shirking expectation, and this is what Ro, and other unconventional would-be parents, have to contend with in the world of Zumas’s novel. Writer, a good teacher, and, hypothetically, a good parent, too. On her running list of “Things to do with baby,” Ro writes: She’s galvanized and ready to fight back, fueled by her own private wants. There are times when she’s able to forget about her circumstances, and to joyfully imagine what her life will be like if she’s able to beat the odds and become a mother, a desire she feels acutely, even though she’s skeptical of its origins. But the novel doesn’t set out to catalog Ro’s despairs.
On top of all of this, she has to contend with fertility treatment that makes her woozy and a nagging feeling that society thinks she’s too old, and too selfish, to be trying to conceive at all. At the novel’s outset, Ro is counting down the weeks until the new law takes effect. Under its edicts, only married people are allowed to adopt. Then, America’s new president passes a series of retrograde laws that he bills as “pro-family”: The Personhood Amendment, which outlaws not only abortion but also in vitro fertilization, and Every Child Needs Two, which is exactly what it sounds like. And Ro isn’t looking to get married she’s single by choice. First, an adoption agency warns her that married couples tend to take priority in the minds of birth mothers. Her journey is obstructed by a series of increasingly alarming governmental mandates. While attempting to become a mother, Ro-a high school history teacher who’s writing a biography of a female polar explorer named Eivor Minevudottir-experiences few moments of hope. But her new book, Red Clocks, has been hailed as a sort of modern-day Handmaid’s Tale, an eerily relevant story centered on reproductive rights. Leni Zumas didn’t set out to write a novel of our political moment.
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