Margaret Atwood recently insisted that everything that she wrote about in The Handmaid’s Tale has happened in real life. Art, of course, often imitates life - although sometimes we wish it didn’t.
That is certainly the case with Lucy Ferriss’s novel, The Misconceiver. Originally published in 1997, it imagines a dystopic world of the United States circa 2026, when Roe v. Wade has been overturned and abortion is banned in all 50 states. After last year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, The Misconceiver has been revived and republished, and we are thrilled to welcome Lucy Ferriss to Skylark to talk about her novel. Skylark will donate a portion of all sales of the book sold that night to the Midwest Access Coalition, and Lucy will also make a donation for every book sold.
Following in the steps of her dead sister and mother, narrator Phoebe Masters works in the computer industry by day and at night performs illegal "misconceptions" in her basement, restoring to desperate women some measure of control over their own bodies. Outside, technology has progressed but social change has moved backward. Married women tend to stay home. Amniocentesis is illegal. The worst punishment for rape is a paternity suit. Homosexuality is back in the closet.
Yet despite her profession, despite the connection she sees between her job stamping out malware and her illicit vocation terminating pregnancies, Phoebe holds few political beliefs—until a love affair forces her to choose between closing herself off and revealing her secret. Betrayed, arrested, and jailed, she begins to confront the multiple contradictions of her world. Eventually she must choose—between revenge and forgiveness, family and self, guilt and accountability, love and action.
Set in a future that is not far-fetched but well within the range of our imagination, The Misconceiver not only addresses one of today’s most immediate issues but also brings to life characters and relationships that could well be ours, just over the horizon of time.
Lucy Ferriss is the author of 11 books, mostly fiction. Her prescient 1997 novel, The Misconceiver, a dystopian story of a 2020s Christo-Fascist America, has received renewed attention since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Other recent work includes Foreign Climes, winner of the Brighthorse Books Award in short fiction, and the novels A Sister to Honor (2015) and The Lost Daughter (2012). Recent fiction and essays appear in The American Scholar, december, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. Her collection of essays, Meditations for a New Century, is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. She lives in Connecticut and the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.
