In our IN CONVERSATION series we are inviting our community to join incredible local authors in conversation about a recent title. This July we are excited to announce Louisa Hall's book Reproduction, Anderson will be speaking with author and MSU professor Zack Bean at Country Bookshelf on Monday, July 31st at 5pm.

“Graceful, precise, and perceptive, this is a memorable take on the danger and strangeness of pregnancy.” — Publishers Weekly

You may be familiar with Louisa Hall from her novels Speak (2015) and Trinity (2018), two acclaimed books that looked at historical figures and fictionalized them in magnificent and surprising ways. In her forthcoming novel Reproduction, Hall turns to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, to explore the costs of reproduction. She looks at motherhood through a fictional lens—through that of a new mother—talking about miscarriage and traumatic birth all without losing the humor of new life and family.

 

At a moment when reproductive rights are deeply under threat, Hall has purposefully rooted this story in the body: the blackout exhaustion, nausea, and secrecy of early pregnancy; the strangeness of a body morphing practically before your eyes; and the huge emotional and psychological changes it brings. Hall writes about these experiences unsparingly, but this book is far from depressing: instead, I think many readers will have the profound experience of feeling seen by it.

In Reproduction, a novelist attempts to write a book about Mary Shelley, a mother and artist whose harrowing pregnancies reveal the cost of human reproduction. Soon, however, the novelist’s own painful experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as her increasing awareness of larger threats from climate change to pandemic, force her to give up on the book and turn instead to writing a contemporary Frankenstein, based on the story of an old friend who mysteriously reappears in her life.