New memoir, “Saving the Fourth Generation,” chronicles a mother’s six-year IVF journey
When 45-year-old Mari Sarkisian Wyatt, a freelance copy editor, decided to have a third child, she knew the odds were slim: women her age have less than a 5% chance of conceiving without medical assistance. Saving the Fourth Generation tells the story of her journey through infertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), which she pursued with the support of her state’s insurance mandate requiring HMO plans offered by large companies to cover three IVF cycles.
Mari worked for two years as a grocery bagger at a large supermarket chain to qualify for coverage. During this time, she interviewed dozens of younger women, some desperate enough to sell their eggs to pay their rent. Finally pregnant, she endured months — and later, years — of health complications, risking her well-being and even her life. Along the way, she met other couples who had suffered even worse setbacks and unimaginable tragedies.
Praise for Saving the Fourth Generation
“Mari Sarkisian Wyatt’s sharply observant eye, her ear for dialogue and her utter lack of self-pity are all to be truly admired. As a reader, one can’t help but feel wholly sympathetic to the narrator as she navigates one challenge after another after another… Although this is a deeply affecting story of an unconventional family and the horrors they must endure, at times it also proves to be darkly funny. Saving the Fourth Generation is, without a doubt, an unforgettable memoir.” — Marian Thurm, author of I Don’t Know How To Tell You This
About the Author
Mari Sarkisian Wyatt is a pseudonym for an Armenian-American writer who received her B.A. from Princeton and her M.A. from Stanford, both in English. After being deemed unemployable by multiple job agencies in her Midwestern hometown, she moved to New York City, where she worked in publishing for over a decade.
Deciding that it would be too difficult to raise a family in Manhattan, she and her husband, Wesley, moved back to the Midwest, where she became a freelance copy editor working from home. Her first child was diagnosed with autism in the early 1990s, a time when the condition was considered untreatable. She and Wesley spent the first six years of their son’s life inventing therapies to help him.
Despite being in her 40s, Mari decided that her son needed a brother. What began as a nice idea — to have a child using assisted reproductive technology — quickly turned into an all-consuming obsession, and she spent six more years trying to fulfill that goal.
Writing under a different name, Mari is the author of four romances and the co-author, with her now adult son, of two self-help guides for parents of special-needs children.
Saving the Fourth Generation is now available for purchase at the following link.
