What's A Lemon Squeezer Doing In My Vagina? : A Memoir of Infertility by Rohini S. Rajagopal

Published by: Penguin Ebury Press/Penguin India

Fiction: Non Fiction, Memoir

Book summary:

When you are denied something, its value is grossly overestimated in your mind. I rejected all the gifts in our life and dwelled on its single deficiency.

Pregnancy was an exclusive club and I wanted to break in.

When Rohini married Ranjith and moved to the 'big city', they had already planned the next five years of their life: job, home, and then child. After three years of marriage and amidst increasing pressure from family, they decided to seek medical help to conceive. But they weren't prepared for what came next-not only in terms of the invasive, gruelling and deeply uncomfortable nature of infertility treatment but also the financial and emotional strain it would put on their marriage, and the gnawing shame and feeling of inadequacy that she would experience as a woman unable to bear a child.

What's a Lemon Squeezer Doing in My Vagina? is a witty, moving and intensely personal retelling of Rohini's five-year-long battle with infertility, capturing the indignities of medical procedures, the sting of prying questions from friends and strangers, the disproportionate burden of treatment on the woman, the everyday anxieties about wayward hormones, follicles and embryos and the overarching anxiety about the outcome of the treatment. It offers a no-holds-barred view of her circuitous and highly bumpy road to motherhood.

About the Author:

Rohini S. Rajagopal was leading a fairly humdrum life in Bangalore when an encounter with infertility stopped her in her tracks. In a temporary suspension of good sense, she quit her well-paying, flexible-hours job to write this book that narrates her journey from infertility to motherhood.

*My Review:

*Thank you Penguin India and author Rohini S. Rajagopal for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

Why should one one read a memoir chronicling the journey that many women in India go through to become a child-bearing mother? The answer is simple: because the onus of child bearing is on women with other women being party to obsessively monitoring when a woman is going to be a mother and if not, why. It is a book that lays bare the many ways in which women's bodies are relegated to being a child bearing vehicle: after all, a man is never described as infertile but a woman is. There are other words for women who are unable to bear children and other socio cultural associations – that they are inauspicious, that they are a burden in this world and worse.

Rohini S. Rajagopal's memoir of her many attempts at pregnancy including IVF is a raw examination of social pressures, individual concerns and the toll on a woman's body when it comes to reproductive health and well being. That she does so with a quiet dignity despite the ebb and flow of emotions and technicalities is a testimony of how the tone of writing is equally important.

Rohini takes readers through a maze of medical processes and therapies, injections and laboratory tests, through a gamut of clinics and what happens inside them but it is the intimate portrayals that make a reader invested. She puts her hopes and anxieties, her desperation and aching despair when things go off track, the guilt and recriminations. This book is not just Rohini's book but a testimony of what women go through when they are on the other side of 30 and childless. There is also a telling commentary on health care providers that emerges: the clinical nature of most doctors on one hand and the quiet empathy and compassion that a few nurses do offer to patients. Written with both humour and candour, this is an important read. 

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