Delicate Condition

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to miscarriage, sexism, and misogyny.

Anna Alcott is a dynamic protagonist whose IVF and pregnancy journeys constitute the plot of Delicate Condition. Anna is an accomplished actress who saw some success early in her career for a television show called Spellbound. Since then, she finds herself in a lull in her career during which she marries Dexter Harding and begins to try to conceive. Anna’s plans shift with the unexpected success of her film The Auteur, which vaults her into the world of media appearances, nagging publicists, and unwanted attention from the public. Over the course of the novel, Anna must navigate both the pressures of unexpected fame as well as the difficultly of conception via IFV and the horrors of the resulting pregnancy.

Having lost her mother at a young age, and being isolated from other friends by her line of work, Anna has few people in her life with whom she is emotionally intimate. Anna’s husband, Dex, is superficially very supportive of Anna’s IVF treatments and continually offers input about Anna’s routines, habits, and body that he believes will help her. At the start of the novel, Anna perceives their relationship to be stable and happy even though Dex regularly engages in gaslighting and mansplaining behaviors.