Thank you so much for reading After She Left. I’m pretty sure that our most valuable resource these days is time, so it means a lot that you would choose to spend some of your hours with Gillian, Oliver, and their friends.

If you can, I’d be so grateful if you could take a moment right now to leave a quick rating on Amazon or wherever you purchased your book. For less established authors like me, it’s incredibly helpful as a way of letting other readers know that this is something they might enjoy.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d share a few words with you about this new novel, and what it means to me.

At its core, I believe After She Left is a novel about parenthood. Gillian is yearning to be a mother, and when she is initially left taking care of her ten-year-old nephew, it only serves to drive home the sense of pain and loss she feels at having to care for someone else’s child instead of her own. But soon, Sam’s presence is opening a door for her, and ultimately I think it’s being a temporary caregiver for Sam that propels her to tackle Oliver once and for all on the subject of IVF.

IVF has become such a huge industry these days, and while it’s wonderful to see it giving hope to so many individuals and families, the huge financial strain it often puts on people shouldn’t be overlooked, nor should the rollercoaster of high stakes and stress that can ensue. And as Dr Tremaine in this book points out, the social messaging around IVF and the responsibility/blame it puts on women’s bodies, is not necessarily always in keeping with the medical reality.

I wanted to try to offer a fair portrait of a couple struggling with this issue—not just with infertility itself, but in their disagreements over how to address it.

The irony, of course, is that Oliver has already participated in IVF, technically. As a sperm donor, he is already someone else’s biological father, a revelation that has blindsided him and that he hasn’t known how to break to Gillian. That blood connection, when it comes to light, is deeply threatening and upsetting to Gillian. (Similarly, in some ways, to how Abigail’s blood connection to Lorna is so threatening to Gloria.) And yet as we see elsewhere in the book, blood doesn’t always mean as much as we think it will, and the absence of blood ties never needs to stop us from creating family.

Hopefully what all of the characters in After She Left come to see is that while blood is often a good starting-point for family, it never has to define us.