Social Affairs: Four out of five couples fail to bring home a baby. Four out of five women suffer cascading emotions brought on by hormone treatments, then experience sweetest hope followed by most bitter despair.
Four out of five men watch their partners bravely submit to egg harvesting, while they are sent to a grey little room to masturbate. Four out of five couples discover that dozens of the resulting embryos conceived in vitro - their "maybe babies" - have either failed to implant or have been disposed of before implantation in ways they may or may not want to imagine or even enquire about.
But most of all , it's a must-read for any woman considering IVF who believes that she will be one of the lucky ones. Not for nothing is it subtitled The true story of one woman's desire to give life and how it almost destroyed her own.
Hoping against hope that she would be the one in five who succeeded, Martina saw the odds win out. Driven into madness by the emotional demands of IVF, she became one of the four out of five who give their all with nothing to show for it at the end.
In only one desperate year, she had three failed IVF attempts and one life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. She lost 10 "maybe babies" who failed to implant, but who in their mother's heart were real, living babies with soft, starfish hands. She even named them: Finbarr, Rory, Molly. When doing up her house, she built a downstairs toilet for them, anticipating that they wouldn't be able to climb the stairs fast enough when being potty-trained. She hid a christening gown and lacy socks and baby clothes in a bottom drawer, taking them out in secret to imagine them filled with gurgling, squirming baby.
Her fantasy life about her babies was so rich she didn't need radio or TV as she lay in bed, willing the implanted embryos to latch on and live. She downshifted her career, already seeing herself as a part-time working mother.
But at the end of a year of heroic effort, she was left with only two mortal truths: her marriage was over and she was barren. Left without husband and home, she descended into madness brought on by grief and exhaustion and blocked out her pain with sleeping pills. Her success in grappling her way out of the abyss to emerge as a transformed, more mature and realistic woman is a lesson in itself. The book is written in hindsight, which means that Martina observes and records the breakdown of her marriage with a wise eye. Her account of how two people married for the wrong reason should probably be required reading on pre-marriage courses.
Almost from the moment they met in London, Martina and "Brendan" (his name is changed in the book to protect his privacy) saw each other as parents. Returning to Ireland to set down roots and start a family was their shared dream but, almost from their wedding day, their relationship was dominated by Martina's obsession with becoming pregnant and Brendan's disappointment when she didn't. Non-existent children were the rock on which their marriage was based and when that rock eroded, they had no marriage left.
Martina's marriage to Brendan was her second. The first was the culmination of a teenage love affair so brief it was annulled. Yet it haunted her that if only she had got pregnant with her first husband, she never would have become barren. She might never have caught the "bug" that destroyed her Fallopian tubes.
Martina's ability to live in fantasy may have been damaging to her relationships with her two husbands, but it proved her salvation when she was recovering from her depression. Her escape into the lives of her fictional characters enabled her to forget her own agony and, gradually, with the publication of her first novel in 2000 she began to experience a feeling she recognised as joy. Three more novels have followed in as many years.
The joy in her life now also comes from close relationships with her godchildren, nephews and nieces - one of whom was born through IVF. She has embraced the advantages of being childless, while never feeling "childfree". She has accepted that her heart will always hurt, even though now it's no longer completely hollow.
The Hollow Heart, By Martina Devlin, Penguin Ireland, 263pp. €13.99
Kate Holmquist is a journalist with The Irish Times
