Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty

Review Quotes:

"Inconceivable is a revelatory and deeply humane look at how a pitiless economic system is robbing people of the intimacies that often make life worthwhile. In her fascinating, globe-spanning reporting, Anna Louie Sussman captures the stories behind the breakdown in family formation." --Michelle Goldberg, New York Times opinion columnist, author of The Means of Reproduction

"In this scrupulously researched, immensely readable, and eye-opening book, Anna Louie Sussman takes us through a world that was, until quite recently, inconceivable: one in which fewer and fewer people are finding partners, making stable lives with time for friends and fun, and having the number of children they say they want to have. What on earth is going on? Sussman has a lot to say both about how we got here and how we can make society fairer, more humane, and more enjoyable for everyone, whether they want to have children or not." --Katha Pollitt, columnist, The Nation

"The economics alone are damning: greedy jobs, mountains of student debt, ruinous housing costs, and childcare that consumes a full salary. Anna Louie Sussman's book brings us the grinding consequences of those abstractions for those who did everything right, yet still found that starting a family had become, well, inconceivable. As someone who studies labor markets for a living, I knew the numbers. Sussman taught me what the spreadsheet misses." --David Autor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Daniel and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in Economics, Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, and co-author of The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines

"For years, as a journalist, Anna Louie Sussman has been prescient on every aspect of fertility, reproduction, gender relations, and economic insecurity--she has reported on countless scientific studies, considered all trends and social phenomena, and sought to verify her many hypotheses through dogged reporting with real people. In Inconceivable, she finally brings her entire arsenal of analysis to understand what many consider a rapidly unfolding global crisis: plunging birthrates and diminishing populations, from the United States to Turkey to South Korea. But the book's great pleasure is that it also goes way beyond sociological and economic studies. It is also a passionate, thoughtful, and often movingly poetic exploration of life's most fundamental questions: Why do so many of us feel so scared of the future? How should we take care of one another? What does it mean to cherish human life? This is certain to be a definitive work."--Suzy Hansen, author of From Life Itself and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Notes on a Foreign Country

"Anna Louie Sussman has delivered a thoughtful, deeply reported investigation into contemporary family formation, giving voice to those who feel parenthood and partnership have become so seemingly out of reach. Inconceivable will start innumerable conversations among those who see declining marriage and fertility rates both in the U.S. and around the world, and wonder what, if anything, can be done to change our trajectory. You may not agree with her answers--but you can't deny that Sussman is asking the right questions."--Patrick T. Brown, fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center

"Fertility rates are falling across the globe, and no one seems to know how to reverse the trend. Anna Louie Sussman combines in-depth reportage and wry self-excavation to tackle one of the biggest questions facing modern civilization: whether and how its next generation will come to be. Inconceivable is nuanced, thought-provoking, and brave--a heartfelt paean to family and shared futures, and an incisive critique of the systems that make both feel impossible to sustain."--Christine Emba, author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation

"Sussman's blend of curiosity and empathy allows the reader to eavesdrop on the most intimate and vulnerable choices a person can make. Inconceivable is a fascinating map of the doubts and hopes that shape American families."--Leah Sargeant, author of The Dignity of Dependence

For generations, creating a family was an ordinary part of human life. But today, there's a marked gap between how many children people want to have, and how many they actually will. As birth rates plummet around the world, this book answers the urgent question: How did such a fundamental human experience drift so far out of reach?

Spurred by the unexpected obstacles she encountered in her own quest to become a parent, journalist and cultural critic Anna Louie Sussman explores what is keeping us from having the families we desire. She asks, in this era of extraordinary opportunity for women, soaring income inequality, and incalculable environmental change, who gets to have children, and why?

Through intimate portraits of individuals and couples who find their parenthood project stymied by barriers their own parents could never have imagined, Sussman shows how decades of policy choices that elevated profits over people and individualism over community have left young people increasingly unable to envision a future in which they and their would-be children might thrive.

In this wide-ranging and deeply reported analysis, Sussman introduces us to an American nurse whose student loans keep him and his wife from trying for the family they've always wanted, and a Polish lawyer barred from receiving IVF as a single woman. She shows how young South Koreans' disgust with a hypercompetitive education system and job market have helped bring the country's fertility rate to the lowest in the world, and why even the stellar family policies of the Nordic states are not enough to combat the sense that the future grows more uncertain and inhospitable to children with every passing day. The stories she shares illustrate the profoundly human cost of what happens when those who dream of having a child are unable to experience that love.

A singular and timely investigation into how everything from partnership to education to the very process of creating a baby has been altered by a capitalist system run amok, Inconceivable is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the universal challenges (and triumphs) of building families in our uncertain age.

Contributor Bio:Sussman, Anna Louie

Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction, and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times. A former staff reporter at Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, she now contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, New York, The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Elle, and other publications. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, the Fetisov Journalism Awards, the Kavli Science Journalism Awards, the Hambidge Center, the Greater Good Science Center, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the DeGroot Foundation, and others. She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, the 2024 cohort of Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows, and an Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence in the fall of 2024. She has reported from two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America.