The Misconceiver

By Lucy Ferriss

Book Overview

This fresh release of an epochal novel from the late 1990s unlocks the dystopic world of the United States circa 2026, when Roe v. Wade has been overturned and abortion finally banned in all 50 states. 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.

While The Misconceiver initially presents its characters' repression matter-of-factly, the accretion of detail concerning their emotional and physical pain makes this far more than a merely political novel. Phoebe is fiercely loyal to the memory of her sister but anxious for her own freedom. Haunted by memory and hunted by the law, she begins to find her true self even as she sheds her old identity. Set in a future that is not far-fetched but well within the range of our imagination, The Misconceiver not only addresses a vivid issue of our time but also brings to life characters and relationships that could well be ours, just over the horizon of time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0BCNSWDKR
• ISBN13: 9798218042714
• Release Date: November 2022
• Publisher: Wandering Aengus Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Prescient and Terrifying

Lucy Ferriss looked not terribly far ahead (this book was published in 1997) to a world where privacy is a thing of the past. Some of the things she sees, and which have come to pass, are a world that runs on plastic cards, print journalism and other paper-based reading material no longer exists, and women are second-class citizens. Included in the nightmare is the fact that discrimination against homosexuals is not only tolerated but encouraged. Sadly, Miss Ferriss saw the future all too accurately in a few respects. This is a frighteningly prescient novel wherein the lead character, a woman who provides abortions (or "misconceptions") finds a web of conspiracy surrounding her in an Orwellian world. This is a book that raises difficult questions, and it is a troubling, but important, read. While set in the future, it returns us to a time when a woman's only function was to marry and breed. Given that American pharmacists are now allowed (on a supposedly limited basis) to refuse to do their jobs on "moral" grounds, and that there is an idiot spouting off about how condoms cause the spread of AIDS, I found it difficult to read this book without nodding in recognition. Lucy Ferriss writes about the future, and it is a scary place to be.