Dealing with Uncertainty: A Review of Crybaby: Infertility, Illness, and Other Things That Were Not the End of the World
Crybaby: Infertility, Illness, and Other Things That Were Not the End of the World
by Cheryl Klein
Brown Paper Press, 2022; 344 pp.; $16.73 (Paperback)
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There’s a Yiddish saying I grew up hearing the adults in my life repeat—der mensch trakht un Got lakht. Or, in English, man plans and God laughs. It’s a fairly well-known saying, and the meaning is straightforward: we have no real control over our path in this world. And yet, we continue to be planners, even as those plans disintegrate before our eyes.
In Cheryl E. Klein’s memoir, Crybaby: Infertility, Illness, and Other Things That Were Not the End of the World, Klein is the one making ill-fated plans despite a universe seemingly conspiring against her. Her plans aren’t too far-fetched either. She wants to find a partner, have children, attain professional success, and stay healthy. Pretty much what most of us would wish for ourselves. Things do not, however, pan out. Instead, Klein is continuously challenged by new, unbelievable sources of consternation and heartbreak. Miscarriage, cancer, infertility, trying to adopt—any one of these would provide adequate material for an insightful memoir. Klein faces all of these, and more, often all at once.
Somewhat surprisingly for a memoir about loss and grief in all its forms (the title is apt; there’s a lot of crying), this book is not a downer. It’s skillfully crafted, a case study in how to write genuine dialogue and poignant-but-funny moments, as when Klein lists things to plan prior to a double mastectomy: “Christmas, baldness, and my unlikely but possible death on the operating table.” The author is an avid and nervous list maker; her memoir is peppered with both mental and physical lists of potential illnesses or outcomes and very real regrets. “I had fifteen pages of notes in a document I’d labeled FreeBoobJob,” she writes, describing a conversation with her surgeon. For all the chronicling and nerves though, Klein never loses sight of the humor and, sometimes, irony found in each moment and she intersperses moments of devastation with playful observations. One moment her emotions are “working [their] way to the surface like an old splinter,” the next she’s describing the experience of being thirty-three in a fertility office as being “like wearing a crown and a sash.” I found myself reading whole passages aloud to my wife on more than one occasion, stopping to write down or take screenshots of the loveliest sentences.
Beyond all the lovely writing, what I appreciated most about this memoir was its radical honesty. Klein gets messy, and I love it. Envy and resentment toward other women who get pregnant. The complexity of her relationship with her sister. Fear and rage about a cancer diagnosis and the ensuing treatments. Detailed discussion of her hypochondriac tendencies. It’s all out there and it is refreshing. Every single person on these pages is a hot mess sometimes, because that’s the truth. There is no simple explanation for who we are: it’s all a big ol’ stew of everything we’ve seen and experienced. Even those for whom Klein harbors resentment get their moments of grace, as when she muses whether an arguably insensitive friend “wanted to protect her daughter, that little cooing extension of herself, from the jagged edges of life for as long as she could. It wasn’t her fault I was one big jagged edge these days.” Oof.
We’ve all had days (or weeks, or months) during which we felt like a jagged edge. Not fit for human company. We’ve all wondered if all we get is bad luck, asked what the hell we did to deserve an onslaught of bad breaks. No one gets out of life unscathed.
Like all great memoirs, Crybaby is more than a recounting of an engaging story. Klein is inching towards a deeper understanding of herself, her loved ones, and her relationship to the chaotic quagmire that is human life. She wants to believe that everything will be alright, but in order to do that she needs to uncurl her fist from around the idea that “alright” needs to look a specific way. The lesson, if there is one, might be that there is no certainty in life, only a series of ambiguous maybes. Early in the book, she writes that she doesn’t know “how to live in the liminal space between elation and devastation.” And yet, this is what life demands of all of us, unrelentingly, as new challenges make themselves known. It’s all liminal—our task is to learn how to roll with the punches even as they keep coming.
Crybaby is, in this way, a book for the ages. While certain themes are specific (queer family building and the experience of LA life, for example), Klein’s persistent search for meaning and self-acceptance are part and parcel of the essence of the human experience. Don’t we all want to know that our tears are justified but that it will get better? Haven’t we all been, at some point, sort of a crybaby? I know I have. If you want to laugh, and cry, and then do both at the same time, this is the book for you.