“The medication, the hormones and the relentless frustrations of our lives make us bitchy and you're not allowed to be bitchy in public or people won't like you.”

“I can hardly bear to think of ourselves hugging and crying and making giggly phone calls, like we were in some inane sitcom. We actually discussed names. Names! I want to shout back through the years at myself, "Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you get a baby, you idiots!”

“We should have given up years ago. It's so clear now. We should have "explored other options." We should have adopted. We gave up years of our lives and we very nearly destroyed our marriage. Our happy ending could have and should have arrived so much sooner. And even though I adore the fact that Francesca has Ben's eyes, I also see now that her biological connection to us is irrelevant.”

“Finally she stopped resisting and called a truce. Young Alice was allowed to stay as long as she didn't eat too much chocolate.”

“So now I just assume that it won't work, and that if it does work, I'll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn't, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I'm never aware of the hope until it's gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another "I'm sorry.”

“That's what's so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I'd never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren't babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren't ever going to be anything else. they were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies. And people have to give up on dreams.”

“I have no right to be sad about anything. No right to have therapy from expensive doctors like you for losing children who never existed. There is real grief in the world. There are real mothers losing real children.”