Product Description

'When I was a teenager, I thought you could get pregnant from sitting in a jacuzzi. Not that I'm sure I even knew what a jacuzzi was, but I knew they were racy places where racy things happened. Men, as far as I remember, didn't even have to be there. So long as they'd been in the water in some sort of excitable state, pregnancy was inevitable - even if you kept your pants on. You see pregnancy was that easy, that dangerous and it could ruin your life. Almost 20 years later and pregnancy could still ruin my life. Although now it is not the threat of what having a baby would do, but of not having a baby at all. I have been trying to get pregnant for two years and have not even come close to hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet...' So begins "The Stork Club", Imogen Edwards-Jones' very personal, very moving and very funny memoir of her (and her husband's) trials and tribulations with IVF. Poked and prodded by endless doctors, pumped full of an exotic cocktail of drugs and forced to try to have sex at the most inopportune moments, Imogen pulls no punches in her account of this process. In her words, 'The fertility game is like a marathon, where you just have to keep on running. No matter how many times the finishing line is moved, no matter how increasingly heavy the going or unpleasant the terrain, you pick yourself up and, ever more determinedly, keep on going. Until one day, you pray, you might just make it...'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87768 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Publisher
The hilarious and touching true story of one woman's trials and tribulations with IVF

From the Back Cover
When Imogen Edwards-Jones was a teenager, she believed that getting pregnant was easy, the inevitable consequence of sex, and that it could ruin her life. Twenty years later, pregnancy could still ruin her life. Although now it was not the threat of what having a baby would do, but of not having a baby at all. Based on her hugely successful Daily Telegraph column, The Stork Club is Imogen's very personal, very moving and very funny memoir of her (and her husband's) attempts to conceive. Poked and prodded by endless doctors, pumped full of an exotic cocktail of drugs and forced to try to have sex at the most inopportune moments, Imogen pulls no punches in her account of this gruelling process. On a voyage through despair and elation, she undergoes artificial insemination and IVF, takes endless fertility pills and injects herself with drugs more than a thousand times. Funny and heartbreaking, this is a detailed, poignant account of one woman’s journey to motherhood – proof positive that there’s light at the end of the darkest of tunnels… ‘Brutally honest yet often hilarious’ OK ‘Compelling … it made me laugh out loud and cry’ Woman’s Own

About the Author
Imogen Edwards-Jones is the bestselling author of Hotel Babylon, Air Babylon and Fashion Babylon, as well as the novels My Canape Hell, Shagpile, The Wendy House and Tuscany for Beginners. She lives in west London with her husband, Kenton and their new baby daughter.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant & Refreshing
This book was brilliant, very honest, very open and very funny. If you want to take a break from your own infertility problems and feel like you need to be able to laugh through the side effects of Clomid and infertility treatments then buy this book.

very moving
A friend bought this for my wife. She has been through the IVF process 3 times and has still not managed to go to term - we both read it and both found this book very helpful. It was very moving. It made us cry and laugh. And I found the author's journey extremely interesting and enlightening. I would recommend it to anyone who is doing or about to undergo treatment.

not much help i'm afraid
Assuming that the main market for this book is anyone thinking about, or about to undertake IVF, I wouldn't recommend this if a) you are re-mortgaging your house to pay for the treatment or b) are having to hold down a full time job throughout the duration of the IVF. Edwards-Jones, despite constantly carping on about the price of her various experiences of both mainstream and 'alternative' fertilty treatment, seems to have unlimited funds, thanks to her chauffeur driven husband and manages to juggle appointments with the UK's most pretigious and exclusive fertility experts with 5 star holidays in far flung places in order to recover from her ordeals. Nice work if you can get it. Bearing in mind the vast majority of desperate, infertile couples are working double shifts and borrowing money beyond their means in order to fund treatment, it's difficult to feel anything like sympathy or empathy for the narrator.

Even despite this irritation, this book is nothing like as informative, and definitely not as funny as the claims made by presumably her mates featured on the back cover. It's a collection of her Telegraph column, and the author or publisher has made little effort to edit it so that we aren't given numerous 'flash-backs' to remind us of what she's already been through. If like me, you read this book in one sitting, the re-capping gets a bit tedious.

There are so few honest and informative books on IVF - it's a shame this one also is wide of the mark.