From the introduction: "You're going to write about infertility? You're going to write about IVF? About us?" he said. He practically cupped his hands over his crotch, like I was going to kick him in the balls. "What's your problem?" I said. I wanted to blog about it. I wanted to get it off my chest. Too many women in Hollywood hide the fact that they can't have a baby the so-called normal way, and I didn't want to be one of them. "It's my body that's broken, not yours," I said. "The world doesn't need to know about this," he said. Was he blushing? I suppose he had a say. He was the one I was trying to have a baby with. I was planning to marry him. But I also believed he was wrong. "Maybe the world does." My mother was such a role-model of truth-telling that I've always known I would say and do whatever I needed to say and do. Whether it was pursuing what I was passionate about when I got out of college (acting) or revealing my big dark secret lurking in the closet to hundreds of thousands of strangers (infertility), I don't know how to hide the truth. I don't know how to keep my mouth shut. I don't know how not to say to other women, "What do you think about this?" Part of being a strong woman is telling the goddamn truth. That's how you are true to yourself, and that's how you can be there for other women, too. That's why I'm writing this book. Women need to talk to each other. We need to share our stories. This is what makes a community. This is what holds us up. I believe this so strongly that I'm willing to share my very private story, to be vulnerable in front of you--so you can know that you are not alone. Infertility can feel like a dirty little secret. What's the opposite of emasculated? De-feminized? Whatever that word is, that's how infertility can make a woman feel. If you can't have a baby, especially if your heart aches to be a mother, if you're so baby crazy you can't think of anything else, infertility feels like a punch in the stomach, a negation of your power. What good are you? You can begin to feel like you are nothing, even if you keep on keeping onwith your regular life, never revealing to anyone your private shame. Or, you get proactive--we go to such extreme lengths, financial and emotional and physical and intellectual, to have a baby, using every bit of modern technology we can get our hands on. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. I want to explore what all of this means. I want to ask the questions you might think to yourself, in your most dark and secret hour, but which you are afraid to voice. Are you a woman? Do you deserve a baby? Do you really even want a baby? And if you do, what price will you be willing to pay to get one? In this book, I want to talk about these questions, in my own life and in yours. I want to talk about some of women's most terrifying and heartbreaking moments-- and some of our shallower, vainer moments, too. They all make us who we are. From the day I lost my mother to the day I had my daughter and everything in between, let's just put it all out there, shall we? Let's just say what we need to say.