E=mc²: A Story of Infertility, Miscarriage, and Love
defies the one-dimensional view of fertility medicine as a sterile, clinical process by sharing the deeply human, tender, and often vulnerable journey of one woman determined to become a mother.
Over ten years of being poked, prodded, opened up, and stitched back together, Clemens invites readers into a world where hilarity and heartbreak often share the same breath. With honesty, humor, and grace, she explores the emotional terrain of infertility and pregnancy loss—how it reshapes identity, relationships, and the meaning of love itself. Along the way, she uncovers the hard-won truths that come with holding both hope and grief in equal measure.
Clemens’s story is ultimately one of transformation. As she carries the lessons of loss into early motherhood, she offers a resonant reflection on resilience, the complexity of the maternal experience, and the quiet strength it takes to keep moving forward. For anyone who has longed for something just out of reach, E=mc² offers compassion, connection, and the comfort of being seen.
This is not your Hallmark miscarriage story. In E=mc²: A Story of Infertility, Miscarriage, and Love, Colleen Clemens tears the glossy narrative off reproductive grief. What’s left is raw, real, and bracingly intimate: a woman navigating the daily wreckage of pregnancy loss — while showing up to work, holding her marriage together, and silently unraveling. Fierce, unflinching, and deeply human, this memoir shows just how far we’ll go to survive — and how much we’ll risk — for love.
— Jenna Hollenstein, author of Eat to Love and Mommysattva
There is a difference between listening to the body and listening to the self. But how can a person hear one without filtering its message through the other? In E=mc²: A Story of Infertility, Miscarriage, and Love, Colleen Lutz Clemens invites us to consider this paradox. More than a memoir, this is a graceful — though fierce — meditation on longing, loss, and womanhood. With language as precise as a physician’s instrument, Clemens draws us into the emotional and physical landscapes of infertility. She drags our minds along the austere furniture of sterile waiting rooms. She lets us hear the strained conversations with well-meaning strangers. She threads us into her body like the needle in her weekly blood draws. She asks us not just to bear witness but to understand what it means to suffer through hope, to inhabit the guarded space between excitement and denial, to ache with every try in the face of a body that knows something urgently that the mind cannot accept. Clemens writes unflinchingly through cycles of failure and resilience, spurts of jealousy and grace, moments of desperation and surrender. Men should read this. Women should read this. Parents should read this. If you have a beating heart, this book will remind you why it beats.
— Robert Fillman, author of The Melting Point
In Colleen Clemens’ new memoir — E=mc2: A Story of Infertility, Miscarriage, and Love — energy/dreams and mass/grief collide. What follows is a sometimes painful, sometimes humorous, always honest narrative that juggles if and when, safe and unsafe, control and chance, private and public, and process and outcome. Informed by yoga, the natural world, historical events, and medical jargon, E=mc2 inhabits sterile clinics, busy classrooms, and a home life invaded by routine, as well as the landscapes of Paris, Delhi, and the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Most importantly, it lingers in each complicated room of the heart — longing, sorrow, envy, anger, fear, hope, and joy. Balancing the anecdotal and scientific, Clemens ultimately gifts us understanding and insight.
— Marjorie Maddox, author of Seeing Things
In this deeply personal and unflinchingly honest memoir, Clemens invites readers into the heart of her journey through infertility and miscarriage — a cycle of hope, heartbeats, and heartbreak. With keen insight, she explores the silent struggles of longing, the unexpected sting of casual questions, and the delicate balance women must navigate between societal expectations and their personal path. A powerful testament to love, loss, and the strength to keep moving forward.
— Rebecca Beardsall, author of The Unfurling Frond
E=mc² tells a searching story of what it can mean to yearn for a child through years of repeated, stifled, yet never-forgotten losses. Clemens explores how language, identity, and feminine ideals foreground reproductive loss with a clear-eye, wry humour and the inspiring wisdom of her yoga practice. Her words will find their way into the hearts of many.
–Julia Bueno, author of The Brink of Being: Talking About Miscarriage
Clemens makes the dare clear, giving us the happy ending right up front. We don’t wonder what will happen. Through Clemens’ writing — unflinching, raw, real to the bone — we are challenged to face the happen-ing. Cringing, laughing, and crying, we are there: in her marriage, at work, in the car, at the store, between her legs, at the doctor, in Paris, India, at home. And in Colleen’s struggles, we begin to see ourselves, and our own relationship with the yearn to conceive and bring forth goodness, meaning, from within, as we too, in our own lives, try, fail, and yet, in spite of the odds, try again. In a story literally about striving for outcome, Clemens’ brilliant writing turns the tale upside down, to show us that real story, real hope, real life, is found in the trying. Thank you, Ev, for being the intention and for the incredible story you led your mother to deliver.
— Vera Cole, author and caregiver