I’ve been reading so-called “infertility blogs” lately. I’ll grant that’s a bit on the odd side, given my super-fertile status, and I’m not altogether sure myself how to explain it. It all started with Chez Miscarriage. I had been noticing it for months on the blogrolls of other blogs I read, but I had never clicked on the link. The title made me faintly uncomfortable, because I have little real-life experience–thankfully–with infertility and I didn’t think I would be able to relate to the writer, and also because I felt as though my reading might be an unwelcome intrusion into a stranger’s private grief.

A couple of weeks ago, however, my curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the link … and I was hooked. I confess that there was initially a certain voyeuristic character to my fascination, but before long my almost-prurient interest had turned into genuine concern. I was completely drawn in to the ups and downs of this woman’s struggle to have a child.

From Chez Miscarriage, I followed links to another blog, then another, then another. There are two things, I think, that make these blogs such compelling reads for me. The first is the gut-wrenching honesty of the women who write them. It’s hard not to feel a connection to someone who puts so much of herself into her writing, who lays her soul bare for all the world to read. The second is that the writing is so damned good that I can’t stop reading. Many of these women are so smart and they’re such good writers that my devotion to their blogs was born of a mixture of envy and admiration.

Somewhere along the line, these blogs stopped being about infertility to me, and started being about the individuals behind them. That still doesn’t make me part of their target audience, perhaps, but I don’t feel quite so much like an intruder as I did before I started seeing the woman before the infertility.