June 9, 2026
Happy Pub Day to THE LOST SEASON
“When I picked up Fowles’ The Lost Season: A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded by Women, I’d understood the title to be a reference to those seven years, to the seven years it had (surprise!) taken Fowles to publish a book after becoming a mother, this book. And while “The Lost Season” does indeed refer to those years, the title means something different from what I’d anticipated, which had been the loss as a creative loss, time squandered that the artist will never recover, an account of the books that didn’t get written while she was busy changing diapers.
No, instead “The Lost Season” is a season of being lost, rather than a season of losing—save for the way Fowles had also lost herself, with everything that had previously anchored her identity and understanding of the world upended by the arrival of her daughter (not to mention years of struggling with infertility before that).
Which is not nothing, obviously—this kind of loss is terrifying and devastating—but there’s also nothing fallow about it, and the point of the book is that the creative seeds sown during those seven years, during that lost season, would turn out to be bountiful. And this is such a more interesting narrative than those affirming the standard line about motherhood and writing being incompatible, hybridity impossible, that every baby you have equals one less book.
Fowles pushes back on all this, her memoir opening with a powerful reclamation of not just mothers writing at all, but mothers writing about motherhood, and why such writing matters, never mind “the voices of literary men, or the anxious voice inside me that asks to be to be small and hidden, to pretend it doesn’t matter.”
She writes: My daughter is in every moment—every small, quiet, intimate thing. She is all the pieces of me, public and private, lost and found, broken and healed. And she is certainly in the writing. In every word.
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Congratulations to Stacey May Fowles on the release of your memoir, and thank you for the inspiration that led to my “Hybrid Creatures” essay on Substack. This book is so good.
