What to Watch and Read When You Need to Feel Less Alone

There are days during a fertility journey when you don't want information. You don't want advice or a checklist or a guided reflection. You want to find your experience somewhere outside yourself — to encounter something that says I know what this is and have you recognize it as true.

This is what good art does for grief and difficulty. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't provide the answer. It makes you less alone with whatever you're carrying by demonstrating that someone else understood it specifically enough to put it into a film or a book or a piece of writing.

What follows is a curated list — drawn from what infertility communities consistently return to, from recommendations across years of patient conversation, and from the broader landscape of work that engages honestly with longing, loss, and the experience of navigating an uncertain future. It is not exhaustive. It is a starting point organized by what you might need on a particular kind of day.

When you need something that tells the complete truth without prettifying it

Private Life (2018, Netflix) — The most accurate film depiction of infertility available. A couple in their mid-forties in New York navigating donor eggs, an unconventional family member, and a marriage under the specific pressure of long-term treatment. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins from her own experience. Stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti. It doesn't resolve. That's the point.

Silent Sorority by Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos — A memoir of fertility treatment that ends without a pregnancy — not as tragedy, but as honest account of what it looks like to stop and build a life that is genuinely good. The most complete written account of the full emotional landscape of infertility, including the parts that other books skip.

Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein — Six years of trying, told by a journalist who applied to her own experience the same precision she'd bring to any story. Covers miscarriage, multiple treatment modalities, a cancer diagnosis partway through, and what it looks like to keep going when the journey keeps changing shape.

When you need four minutes of being completely understood

The opening sequence of Up (Pixar, 2009) — Four minutes of animation, almost no dialogue. A couple's life together: the joy, the ordinary accumulation, and the quiet loss that changes the shape of everything. It has produced recognition in millions of people who weren't expecting to be devastated by a Pixar film. Watch it when you have a few minutes alone and the capacity to cry. Let it do what it was made to do.

When you want to think alongside your experience rather than just be supported through it

The Art of Waiting by Belle Boggs — A hybrid of personal narrative and reported essay on reproduction, longing, and family formation across different contexts. Asks what it means to keep living intentionally during an extended period of uncertainty. More intellectually engaged than most fertility books; more useful for it.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken — A memoir of stillbirth and a subsequent pregnancy, written by a novelist who brings the precision of literary craft to the experience of catastrophic loss and the terrifying hope that follows it. Not specifically about fertility treatment, but about the grief of pregnancy loss and what comes after with more accuracy and more grace than almost anything else written on the subject.

When you need to hear from the people who are in it

The communities on Reddit — particularly r/infertility, r/IVF, and r/maleinfertility — are among the most honest, specific, and unsentimental conversations about this experience available anywhere. They are not moderated toward hope. They are moderated toward truth, and members have little patience for platitudes. What you will find there is people in the same thing, speaking the same language, at every stage and from every outcome. The infertility subreddits are one of the few places where the full complexity of this experience is permitted to exist without being shaped into a more comfortable narrative.

When you need something to listen to

Big Fat Negative — Two journalists, Emma Belle and Gabriella Griffith, documenting their own IVF journeys in real time alongside medical expert interviews. Honest, sometimes dark, occasionally very funny. Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Fertility Docs Uncensored — Three board-certified reproductive endocrinologists answering real patient questions in plain language. Particularly useful when you're trying to understand a clinical decision and need someone to explain it without euphemism. Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Don't Tell Me to Relax — The only major podcast focused specifically on the male experience of infertility. Hosted by two men who went through it. Interviews with urologists, embryologists, and men sharing personal accounts. For women: valuable for understanding what your partner may not be saying. Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

When you need to read something that won't make you feel worse

Not everything on this list is light. Most of it isn't. But there are days when the honest and heavy stuff is exactly wrong — when what you need is something that engages with difficulty without being overwhelmed by it.

The Art of Waiting by Belle Boggs sits here too — its intellectual engagement creates some distance from the emotional weight, which is useful on certain days.

Orenstein's "Waiting for Daisy" is darkly funny in places — genuinely funny, not performing lightness — in a way that allows you to laugh at things that are also genuinely hard. If you need permission to laugh during this, she gives it.

The r/infertility community produces an ongoing stream of posts from people describing moments that are absurd as well as hard — the specific comedy of certain aspects of treatment, the dark humor that functions as genuine coping. Spending time in those threads on the right day is its own form of support.

When you're looking for something your partner might read or watch

Private Life — for couples. Watch together. It will surface things that are hard to surface in conversation.

Don't Tell Me to Relax — for the male partner specifically. If he's not talking about what he's going through, this podcast may be the first thing that tells him he's allowed to.

How to Make Love to a Plastic Cup by Greg Wolfe — The only major book written specifically for men navigating IVF from the partner's perspective. Uses humor and complete honesty. The title is accurate to the book's tone. For women who want their partner to read something: this is it.

A Note on Timing

The things on this list work differently depending on when you encounter them. "Private Life" watched on the night of a failed cycle is a different experience from "Private Life" watched during a window between cycles. The opening of "Up" lands differently at different points in the journey.

Pay attention to what you have the capacity for and when. Some of this material is close to the bone. Some days that closeness is what you need — the recognition, the I-am-not-alone. Other days you need something that holds the difficulty from a slightly greater distance. Neither need is wrong. The list is here whenever the right day for any piece of it arrives.

Reflect

These questions are for after spending time with any of the above.

Which recommendation on this list are you most drawn to right now, and what does that tell you about what you need today?

Is there something you've encountered — a film, a book, a podcast, a Reddit thread — that made you feel genuinely less alone in this? Have you shared it with your partner or with anyone else going through something similar?

What does it do for you, specifically, to find your experience depicted accurately somewhere outside yourself? Is there something in that recognition that you need more of right now?