The Art of Waiting: A Book About What Longing Actually Is

Belle Boggs is a writer and teacher. She is also someone who spent years trying to conceive before her daughter was eventually born, and who, during that waiting, became curious about waiting itself — about what it does to a person, what it means culturally and biologically and historically, what connects the experience of women navigating infertility to the broader human experience of longing for something that may or may not arrive.

"The Art of Waiting," published by Graywolf Press in 2016, is the book that curiosity produced. It is not a straightforward memoir. It is something more unusual: a hybrid of personal narrative and reported essay that moves between Boggs's own experience and the wider landscape of reproduction, longing, family formation, and what it means to want a particular kind of future with the intensity that infertility tends to produce.

It is a more intellectually engaged book than most fertility memoirs. It demands more of its reader. And it offers, in return, a more expansive picture of the territory than most books in this space provide.

What the Book Is

"The Art of Waiting" contains Boggs's personal story — the trying, the uncertainty, the medical involvement, the emotional texture of months and years of waiting for something that hasn't come — woven together with reported essays on subjects including animal reproduction, the cultural history of longing and fertility, same-sex couples navigating family formation, adoption, and the assisted reproductive technology industry.

The effect of this structure is to place the personal experience inside a larger frame. Boggs's waiting is part of the book, but it is not the whole book — it exists alongside research into how other species navigate reproduction, alongside the stories of people who built families through different paths, alongside cultural and historical analysis of what human beings have always made of the desire to have children and the grief when that desire goes unmet.

This could feel distancing. It doesn't. The expanded frame actually does something useful: it situates the experience of infertility as part of the human experience in a way that reduces the isolation of feeling like what you're going through is singular and unprecedented. It turns out that longing for something that may not come — and continuing to live and love and build meaning in the presence of that uncertainty — is one of the most consistent human experiences across history and culture. "The Art of Waiting" makes that visible.

On the Title

The title is doing more work than it might initially appear to be doing. Waiting, for Boggs, is not simply the passive state of being in between something — the unpleasant interlude before the real story begins. It is an active practice with its own particular demands and its own particular possibilities. It requires the capacity to continue inhabiting your life while holding uncertainty about something enormous. It requires a relationship with hope that doesn't depend on certainty. It requires, in some sense, skill.

The "art" of waiting is the suggestion that waiting can be approached with intention — that it is something that can be done well or poorly, consciously or unconsciously, and that how it's done matters to the person doing it and to the life being lived while the waiting happens.

This reframe is one of the more useful things the book offers. Most treatments of the infertility experience are about enduring the waiting — getting through it, surviving it, making it to the other side. Boggs's framing suggests something different: that the waiting itself is a period of life that can be inhabited rather than merely endured, and that how it is inhabited matters independently of how it resolves.

What It Offers That Other Books Don't

The chapters on same-sex couples navigating family formation are particularly strong and represent something unusual in fertility literature: a genuinely inclusive treatment of the range of ways people try to build families, written with enough specificity to be useful rather than merely acknowledged.

The essays on the natural world — on how other species navigate reproduction, on the biological and evolutionary contexts of human fertility — are stranger and more interesting than they might sound. They're not dry or clinical. They situate the human experience of fertility and infertility inside a much larger biological story in a way that is, oddly, comforting — a reminder that the body's relationship with reproduction is complex across all of life, not a peculiarity of human experience.

The personal narrative is honest without being overwrought. Boggs writes about the emotional experience of trying to conceive with the precision of someone who was paying close attention while it was happening. The specific texture of the hope that recalibrates after each month, the particular quality of the uncertainty, the way the experience changes your relationship with time — these are rendered with the kind of accuracy that produces recognition in readers going through the same thing.

The Question the Book Raises

"The Art of Waiting" raises a question that it doesn't directly answer but that most people going through infertility are implicitly grappling with: what does it mean to keep living — fully, intentionally, with genuine investment in the present — when the future you're hoping for hasn't arrived yet and may not?

This is the central practical question of any extended fertility journey. How do you inhabit the life you have while hoping for the life you want? How do you invest in the present without feeling like you're accepting a substitute? How do you hold the waiting without letting it become the only thing?

The book doesn't resolve this question, but it makes it more visible and more nameable, which is the first step toward being able to work with it. Reading it alongside your own experience tends to surface things about the relationship with waiting that are worth examining — about how you're moving through this period, what you're setting aside while you wait, what you're continuing to inhabit, and whether the balance feels right.

Who Should Read This and When

"The Art of Waiting" is for women who want to think alongside their experience rather than just be supported through it — who can hold the intellectual alongside the emotional and find that engagement useful rather than distancing.

It is particularly useful during the middle of a fertility journey — not at the very beginning, when the medical landscape is still being learned, and not at the very end, when there's resolution to make sense of. During the waiting itself: when the question is how to keep living while you keep trying, and when that question needs more than reassurance.

Read it slowly. It's not a book that rewards rushing.

Note: "The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood" by Belle Boggs was published by Graywolf Press in 2016. Available through major booksellers and libraries.

Reflect

These questions are for sitting with during or after reading.

What does your relationship with waiting actually look like right now — are you enduring it or inhabiting it? What's the difference, in practice, for you?

Boggs frames waiting as something that can be done with more or less intention. What would it mean to approach this period with more intention — not about the outcome, but about how you're living in it?

The book expands the frame of infertility to include many different experiences of longing and family formation. Does that expansion feel useful — does it reduce the isolation — or does it feel distancing from your specific experience?