“Infertility Turned the Initial Abstraction into Obsession:” A Conversation with Samantha Browning Shea
Samantha Browning Shea is the vice president of Georges Borchardt, Inc., Literary Agency and mother to two young girls. Throughout her years as a literary agent, Samantha has shepherded the books of many writers into the world, but last year she came out as an author herself. Her debut novel, Marrow, launched in September 2025. Marrow is a dark and gripping story about a woman named Oona who has suffered multiple miscarriages and sneaks into her mother’s coven of midwife-witches, hoping for power, absolution, belonging, and a successful pregnancy. I spoke to Samantha over Zoom and email about the desire to become a mother, finding inspiration in infertility, and wellness culture’s attempts to turn pregnancy into profit. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper: Which elements of Marrow did you conceive of first and why were you drawn to them?
Samantha Browning Shea: Marrow started with Oona and her wanting—a character born out of my own experience with infertility. I was steeped in the kind of longing that takes over your body and your sense of time, and I needed somewhere to put it. Oona became the vessel.
I was also reading A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (2003). I was fascinated by the emotional circuitry between the sisters, but I kept wondering: what would have happened if the antagonist were a mother instead of a father. That question gave birth to the electric, often fraught connection I wrote between Oona and her mother, Ursula, in Marrow. That’s where the story really lived.
BAT: The desire to become a mother is so central to Marrow. Oona’s desire drives the plot, of course, but there are so many women who want to be mothers. Why did you want to become a mom?
SBS: I don’t think there was a specific reason I wanted to be a mother. Maybe it was biological? Maybe I felt my family was incomplete? I love my husband, and I loved our days before kids too, but I was like, “This is it? We’re gonna go out to eat and go on vacation twice a year?” It felt like there was more to experience than that.
In the earliest draft, Oona just wanted a baby—plain and simple, the way I did. But halfway through, she started wanting something more mythic: not just motherhood but access, power, belonging. When my agent suggested amplifying the mystical elements, I realized the real story wasn’t about the baby, it was about the longing for transformation.
That shift mirrored my own experience. At first, the idea of motherhood felt abstract, even a little terrifying. Originally, my husband and I weren’t trying, exactly. We just thought we’d see what happens. There was a moment early on when I thought I might be pregnant, and I sort of panicked. I didn’t feel ready. But because we had infertility problems, it became this thing I was more desperate for. I couldn’t have it, and suddenly it was all I wanted. So those two things are interwoven for me. Infertility turned the initial abstraction into obsession. The more unattainable motherhood became, the more sacred it felt. Like Oona, I started to see motherhood not just as care, but as initiation, something that might change me entirely.
BAT: Do you think your struggles with infertility have shaped your experience of mothering your daughters after their births?
SBS: With my first daughter, we had a year of trying and a year of infertility treatments, and there was a question of whether the treatments were going to work for us. So when I did get pregnant, I was just so happy to be pregnant the whole time. Even with all the morning sickness! I was really grateful for the experience. With my second daughter, we had embryos left from our last round so I didn’t have to undergo another egg retrieval. And then the first embryo we implanted took, so the experience was more similar to that of someone who got pregnant on the first try. It was like, “Whoa, that was fast!” There wasn’t all the longing that had preceded the first pregnancy. The second time, I also knew how hard pregnancy can be, and how much I struggled during the newborn days. I knew too much. Every part of it was harder the second time around.
BAT: Can you talk about one experience or moment in your fertility journey that you remember well?
SBS: God, I remember it all so well. Maybe too well. But one moment that really stands out is when we got the call about the final results of our first IVF cycle. We started out all right, ended up with a decent number of eggs retrieved, and our doctors were optimistic. But IVF math is brutal. Fertilization only takes in some. Fewer make it to the embryo stage. Fewer still are genetically normal. The doctors had floated the numbers three or four—a healthy, modest projection—but by the time we got to the end, we only had one. A single embryo.
We were cautioned not to get our hopes up and had resigned ourselves to having to do another round of IVF. So when we got the call that the embryo was viable . . . .
I remember the exact feeling in my body: like I could finally exhale after weeks of holding my breath. And then I looked at my husband—who, honestly, hadn’t always been sure he wanted kids—and he was so visibly relieved, so flooded with emotion, that I realized: oh. He wants this too. Maybe as much as I do. It was the first time I understood the full weight of what we were doing, and the strange, unspoken grief we’d both been carrying around.
BAT: At one point, Oona looks at another woman who has just had a child and thinks, “Why you and not me? Why am I not deserving too? But of course, the truth was that motherhood wasn’t something you deserved . . . motherhood was a choice. It was action.” How did you come to this realization? To what degree do you see this perspective as widely held, or not?
SBS: Those lines actually came rather late in the revision process; the whole epilogue did. Roe had been overturned, abortion clinics were closing around the country, and I was waking up three times a night with my youngest daughter, all while absorbing the fact that my girls would grow up with fewer rights than I had. That reality felt almost chemically destabilizing.
Nothing sharpened my belief in the right to choose like the experience of infertility and then, eventually, giving birth. Motherhood is so much work—beautiful work, but still relentless work. It’s not a cosmic reward. It’s not a moral badge. It’s not something you “deserve.” It’s a full-body undertaking that eclipses you, rebuilds you, then asks for more. The joy doesn’t cancel out the sacrifice—it sits right on top of it.
So yes, I wanted to write a character who, perhaps too late, understands that motherhood is not an identity bestowed on the worthy. It’s a decision, a deliberate action, often made in impossible circumstances. And that decision should belong entirely to the women made to live with the consequences.
I don’t think this perspective is as widely held as it should be. Because holding it requires facing some brutal truths: that our systems don’t actually care about mothers, or children, once they’ve exited the ideological stage of “unborn.” And that, frankly, we’re still stuck in a culture that romanticizes motherhood while punishing women for living it.
BAT: In some ways, Marrow positions caretaking and commerce/consumption as opposing forces. To what extent was this intentional, and to what extent do you see these forces in conflict both in your life and society more broadly?
SBS: In my desperation to get pregnant, I fell into this strange ecosystem of so-called solutions—fertility retreats, specialized diets, massage therapies, an entire marketplace of supplements promising just enough hope to keep you clicking “buy.” Some of it was grounded in real science, but much of it felt predatory, built to capitalize on a very specific kind of female pain: the longing to create life and the guilt that maybe you’re the reason it isn’t happening.
It was wild, the way wellness culture and capitalism entwined themselves around something so intimate. I kept thinking: if I just tried harder, controlled more, spent more, believed more, then maybe it would work. That illusion of control is so seductive, especially when it feels like your body is betraying you.
The whole experience fed directly into the book. I wanted to write into the fog of that vulnerability—the way it opens you up to both wonder and exploitation.
BAT: I wonder if commerce can appear antithetical to caring because we often see commerce as driven by self-interest whereas we think of caring and mothering as generous and other-focused. But maybe this is an over-simplification? How do you see these forces playing out in your work as a literary agent?
SBS: This is something I think about all the time. As a literary agent, I live at the intersection of two forces that are often in quiet conflict: the business of publishing and the art of writing. Publishing, at its core, is an industry, shaped by markets, trends, profit margins. But writing isn’t. Writing is about creating art.
It is my job to advocate for writers not just as artists, but as workers who deserve to be paid, supported, and heard. And when it all clicks—when the art finds its audience and the artist is fairly compensated—it feels like a kind of hard-won justice.