This powerful anthology shatters the silence surrounding women's experiences with reproductive healthcare. Through a compelling collection of essays and hybrid nonfiction, this book is a kaleidoscope of perspectives on a topic shrouded in stigma despite the political conversation it initiates.
From the raw vulnerability of miscarriage to the realities of menstruation, So Heavy a Weight delves into the full spectrum of women's reproductive healthcare. Unflinchingly personal essays by a variety of exceptional writers explore the complexities of abortion, the navigation of a constantly changing body, and the journey from sexual assault to sexual advocacy.
This tapestry of stories is woven with courage and resiliency, fostering understanding and belonging and empowering readers to reclaim their own reproductive health narratives. Contributors include Abigail Thomas, Emma Bolden, Melissa Anderson, Jill Talbot, Marcia Aldrich, Chloe Caldwell, Sonya Huber, and many more.
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Praise for So Heavy a Weight
“Every story boldly tells of life, raw and intimate. The collection inspires empathy, validates experiences, and empowers readers to lend their own voices to a collective truth that must be heard.”
—Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain
“So Heavy a Weight is a timely and vital contribution to the ongoing conversation surrounding women’s reproductive health. I wish I could make every person who has ever made a woman feel inferior because of her body or her desires or her shame or her grief read this essential anthology.”
—Michele Filgate, editor of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About and What My Father and I Don’t Talk About
“A beautiful and profoundly relatable collection of personal stories rooted in women’s bodily and health care experiences. These essays will resonate with any woman who has been amused, horrified, confused, or delighted by our wild, bloody bodies. The juxtaposition of a public simultaneously obsessed with and profoundly negligent toward women’s bodies and reproduction is laid bare with humor and heartbreak. What a wonderful collection!”
—Christine Murphy, author of Notes on Surviving the Fire
“Some anthologies are poised at the right moment but don’t seem particularly intense in their explorations of subject. Others contain work that might be individually electric but lack the thematic cogency a collection requires. So Heavy a Weight, under Stephanie Vessely’s acute editorship, manages to accomplish both of these difficult goals. It is a timely subject, fiercely so, approached by wildly talented writers such as Marcia Aldrich, Jill Talbot, Sonya Huber, Abigail Thomas, Aileen Weintraub, the editor herself, and others, equally accomplished. The range of forms, from short lyrical essay to imagined interview, prose dialogue to list, is impressive, but most important is the range and depth of women’s reproductive experiences represented in this stirring, sometimes wrenching, and necessary anthology.”
—David Lazar, co-editor of 20th Century Essays, Ohio State University Press