Book Review: Delicate Condition by Danielle Valentine

Anna Victoria Alcott is on the verge of having it all. After years of struggling as a working actress, she’s gaining both critical and popular acclaim for her latest movie role, one that’s rumored to be in contention for Oscar consideration. She’s also blissfully happy with her tech entrepreneur husband Dex. The only fly in her ointment is the fact that it’s been two years since they started fertility treatments, and she still hasn’t gotten pregnant. At the age of thirty-nine, she’s beginning to feel like time is running out for her to have a baby.

So when their latest round of IVF succeeds and she gets pregnant, both she and Dex are overjoyed. But her happiness comes with an edge of fear. Despite never having been a forgetful person, she keeps misremembering appointment times and misplacing important items. She’s also convinced that someone is following her. The final straw is when an unknown woman slides into her bed, cradling her stomach and crooning, “Baby.”

The woman escapes before Anna can see her face, prompting Anna to hire a bodyguard and eschew promotional work in favor of hiding out in a friend’s home in the Hamptons. She hates how isolated the town feels in the wintertime, and how her own isolation allows her imagination to run riot:

I thought of the terrible stories I used to love when I was young, stories of fairies who took children from their cribs and replaced them with babies made of wood, of witches who promised wishes in exchange for firstborn children, of predatory birds snatching babies and flying far away. Stories told by women and mothers. Stories no one believed anymore.

 

I didn’t know this then, but the truth is there’s no such thing as an uncomplicated pregnancy. We all give something up in exchange for our babies. Nearly everyone on this planet was welcomed by the sounds of a woman screaming.

Scary things keep happening to her, culminating in a nightmare hospital experience that results in the miscarriage of her longed-for baby. But Anna is soon convinced that there’s something still growing inside her, something not quite right but not quite unwelcome either. Something of unusual strength, with unusual limbs, that’s giving her unnatural cravings. What lengths will Anna go to – what horrible things will she accept and do – in order to have a baby?

Danielle Valentine freely admits in her afterword that Delicate Condition is written in a deliberately hyperbolic manner to draw attention to the very real traumas and horrors of pregnancy and miscarriage. As a mother of three who’s also had two miscarriages myself, I could sympathize. I did find it strange, however, that someone like Anna, younger and likely more worldly than I am, would put up with so much blatant misogynistic nonsense in her personal life. It’s especially jarring since she doesn’t seem at all disconnected from the complexities of modern feminism, as her thoughts on an interview she’s granted shows:

The headline didn’t sit right with me, even though they’d taken it directly from a quote I’d given. I’d meant I wasn’t going to dye my hair and Botox away the wrinkles that had started to crawl across my face. At the time it’d felt like I was part of a larger conversation about women’s aging bodies. […]

 

But, looking at the magazine now, I worried that it sounded like I was passing judgment on women who did do those things, saying they weren’t “real” somehow. It bothered me that I couldn’t get the tone right, even when it meant so much to me.

Anna’s fear of getting the tone wrong often means she chooses silence instead, which is frustrating in a book that complains about medical misogyny but also has its heroine do nothing to advocate for herself. I was also unimpressed by the non-choice given to her towards the end, especially since what happens after seems to tacitly approve of the underhanded maneuvers that led to that point. 

I did appreciate the interstitial chapters that highlight how difficult fertility and childbirth have been for women throughout the ages. I just wish that the modern-day bits had been as powerfully and thought-provokingly written. Instead, they feel like an apologia for pseudoscience, as if being given bad information and choices by women is somehow better than being diminished by patriarchy. Both are terrible, to be clear, and hardly abinary. 

For all my misgivings, this novel definitely succeeds in highlighting the fact that too many women are put in a position where they feel that those are their only options. It’ll be interesting to see where Ryan Murphy et. al. take this story when they adapt it for the next season of the American Horror Story franchise, debuting in September.