Amy Klein's "The Trying Game"

Amy Klein wrote the “Fertility Diary” column for The New York Times’s Motherlode blog for three years. She writes frequently about health and fertility for publications such as Newsweek, Slate, The Washington Post, and others.

Klein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Trying Game Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant without Losing Your Mind, and reported the following:

On page 99 there is one paragraph that really summarizes my thoughts about infertility, if not about the whole book itself.

Page 99 comes at the end of a chapter on how to find a doctor. There is one paragraph that really summarizes my thoughts about infertility, if not about the whole book itself.

In the end, I don’t think there’s one doctor or clinic for everyone. (Thank God, because that doc would be even busier than she is today!) For my friend at the end of her rope who has been to four clinics and tried every protocol, I’ll recommend the most experimental clinic. And for the woman who’s been trying for a year but never had a basic workup done, I’ll suggest a small practice run by a cautious RE who I know won’t force her into invasive treatment too soon.

So that summarizes my thinking about a lot of the field and also how I make recommendations but isn't the whole book.

My book is really compartmentalized - each chapter can almost be its own book. So page 99 is a wonderful window into the technical parts of my book --what is IVF, how do you find a doctor, how do you pay for it, etc.

But since section III of my book is about the emotional journey, I think that's a more apt window of what the book is about or what's special about this book over other infertility books.

So this is a book I wish I had when I was going through infertility. I made so many mistakes along the way – starting with the wrong doctor, staying too long – and I had so many questions not answered in medical literature or online at the time, like how to deal with my boss, or feeling like I hated everyone who was pregnant or how to deal with insurance and when to give up. I wanted this to be a book you can skip to the chapter you’re up to or just skip the chapters you’re not interested in.

Visit Amy Klein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue