Lucy Ferriss - THE MISCONCEIVER rises from the ashes

With Rilla Askew and Mary Kay Zuravleff at the Authors Guild Gala

Read Past Newsletters

"Ferriss strikes the perfect balance between the global and the personal." -- Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

Selected Works

Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"

"Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead's famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with "impossible" characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist's vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading."—Pamela Erens

Essays

Meditations for a New Century

"Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar." --Sudip Bose, American Scholar

Fiction

The Misconceiver

The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn't interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them. . . . The novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life. -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Foreign Climes

"The geographic breadth of Foreign Climes is only the beginning of its power. What makes the collection stunning is Ferriss's ability to go deep inside her characters, to the hidden places where we are foreign to those closest to us and even to ourselves, inviting profound reckoning." -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

A Sister to Honor

"As ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." -- Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

The Lost Daughter

"From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller." —Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

Memoir

Unveiling the Prophet

"Ferriss’s exploration of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is a must read. . . . This is one of the best books of the year."

-- Riverfront Times

THE MISCONCEIVER rises from the ashes

August 1, 2022

The world went upside down for me in July. Maybe it did for you, too. On the one hand, extreme heat broke records everywhere; on the other, the Brits finally rid themselves of Boris Johnson. What sent my personal world topsy-turvy was the sudden renewed interest in The Misconceiver, my dystopic 1997 novel that foretold the overturn of Roe v. Wade and its aftermath. I'm delighted to report that this novel, long out of print, is finally available again.

A little background: I wrote The Misconceiver during the Clinton administration, when the Republican party had seized control of both houses and progressives were worried about attacks on reproductive rights. I wondered what would happen if the worst-case scenario – the complete overturn of Roe v. Wade – were to happen. I set the novel in 2026, two decades after the imagined Supreme Court decision and a decade after the passage of the "Human Life Amendment"; my narrator was an abortion provider ("misconceiver") born at the millennium and subject to the political currents of her time. Simon & Schuster published the novel with a beautiful cover, and reviews around the country were generally glowing. Unfortunately, I had published another novel, Against Gravity, with S&S the year before. Through a series of coincidences that no one would believe if I put them into a novel, the wife of a radical Christian preacher whose doppelgänger played a bit part in that book decided to sue me and Simon & Schuster for libel. The lawsuit cropped up just as The Misconceiver was released, and the publisher's policy was not to distribute books by any author under such a threat. A number of people contacted me, but my hands were tied.

And so The Misconceiver languished for six months, until the suit was dismissed, and the world had moved on. My sales figures were underground, and shortly thereafter the book was remaindered. I licked my wounds and moved on with the world. Every now and then, when a right-wing justice was appointed to the Supreme Court, a bubble of interest in a reissue would arise. But I didn't know how to proceed. The book had foreseen 2026 with all the crystal-ball vision a mortal possessed in 1997, which meant there were Minilaps instead of smartphones, disklets instead of wifi; the World Trade Center remained intact, and Iraq had dropped a bomb on Tel Aviv.

Then came the Supreme Court decision of June 2022. The ever-watchful Ron Charles of The Washington Post drew attention to The Misconceiver, of which perhaps two dozen copies still remained in the world. Within a day, those had all sold. Lucky for me and the book, the generous and nimble folks at Wandering Aengus Press, which will be bringing out my Meditations for a New Century next year, were up to the challenge of reissuing a novel that not only was long out of print, but also had been written on floppy disks that were now corrupted. We scanned a book; corrected the myriad errors caused by OCR conversion; converted that file to an e-book version; and converted that version to a print proof. I have now proofread my own book at least four times. I chose not to update my technology or other predictions; the book is not about technology but about what happens when a society turns against women's free and informed ability to make their own decisions – and on that point, I fear The Misconceiver is not far off the mark. Thanks to the generosity of Honi Werner, we were able to use the original cover design and to augment it with an image pointing to some of the tensions in the book and in our post-Roe world. It is now available as an e-book at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble; by the end of October it will be available as a print book. All the proceeds that come my way from this miraculous reissue will go to help shore up reproductive rights. I hope you'll join me by purchasing a copy, telling your friends, posting reviews, and spreading the word.

Hoping you are keeping well in this difficult summer,

Lucy