Synopsis
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Golden Poppy Book Award Finalist
She’s serving.
She’s eating.
She’s . . . Carrying.
In this electrifying horror debut that’s equal parts funny and harrowing, a stealth trans woman desperate to maintain her picture-perfect life discovers that she’s seemingly—impossibly—pregnant.
“Carrying is a totally original (stomach-turning, laugh-out-loud, horrifying, heartwarming) work of art.” —Marisa Kashino, USA Today bestselling author of Best Offer Wins
Everything Martha’s wanted, she’s made for herself.
Meet Martha: perfect wife, perfect stepmother, perfect woman. She’s got an adoring husband who wants more kids with her, a loving stepdaughter who looks up to her, and a body to die for. She’s an absolute pro: Salon-quality blowouts at home? Done. Perfectly plated meals on the table every day? Effortless. Meticulously faked miscarriages so her husband won’t suspect the truth? Just hand over the Oscar now.
Martha is trans, so stealth even her family has no idea. She carved the woman she is out of the marble of a boy, and she’ll do whatever it takes to protect what she’s built. When a mysterious chronic illness and its debilitating symptoms threaten to upend her existence, she starts experimental treatments and gives in to her surprising, unsettling cravings. She’s even more shocked to discover that she’s undeniably, impossibly pregnant.
With her body changing rapidly outside of her control and her choices dwindling, Martha struggles to maintain the life she’s fought so hard to live while preparing for the motherhood she never thought she’d have.
Review
Carrying is easily the wildest book I’ve read this year. It’s an absolutely unhinged read, from a debut author – Samantha Josephs – who is clearly unafraid to fit as much crazy per page as possible.
Readers get an immediate sense of who Martha is right in the book’s opening chapters, which sees her buying raw meat and pig’s blood to fake an at-home miscarriage. She’s a dramatic impresario, but soon thereafter she begins experiencing strange symptoms of a new disease. She stumbles across an Instagram post promising treatment, but things only get stranger from there. It turns out Martha is pregnant, a medical impossibility because Martha is also trans. Although she was male at birth, Martha has spent the bulk of her life since her teens transforming herself into the ideal woman and perfect wife. Now she has the opportunity to truly have it all and become the woman she’s always dreamed of… as long as her husband never finds out the truth.
Josephs is a trans author herself and you can sense the lived experiences permeating the book and offering the basis for the oftentimes outlandishly heightened horrors Martha experiences. Josephs offers up plenty of commentary on, and insight into, trans and queer cultures and interpersonal relationships within and outside of these communities. Along the way, we’re given easily digestible tidbits on trans history, the biases and judgements that exist within trans culture and the ways in which trans people are viewed by larger, predominant cultures, and what it’s like to exist as a trans person. The threat of violence against Martha and those like her, simply for being trans, is omnipresent, and Josephs handles these issues with the sort of grace and empathy that countervailing voices perpetually lack in their monstrous fearmongering.
This empathy goes a long way to make Carrying work as well as it does. Let’s face it, Martha is a freaking trainwreck. She’s a manipulative, judgmental liar, not to mention a complete and total drama queen with absolutely no chill whatsoever. She is the very definition of a woman that is absolutely extra. She’s also surprisingly endearing, thanks in part of her sense of humor, her forcefully sheer positivity, and her very grounded, real-world fears. When she learns of her impossible pregnancy, she’s faced with the prospect of losing her very-real fetus after having faked a miscarriage, through either a natural or medically induced abortion should the child not be healthy. There’s the overarching concern, as raised by her doctor and best-friend, of what exactly this child might be – is it a freak of nature, a demonic entity, or a lucky genetic fluke? And then there’s the concern of what her husband, Leon, might do should he discover the woman he’s married is trans.
One kinda-sorta has to feel for Leon, at least initially. While Martha constantly maintains that Leon is the most important person in her life and that she loves him so deeply, so desperately, she’s done a great job keeping him completely in the dark, hiding secret upon secret from him, lying to him about her childhood and family and friends; about herself most of all. On the other hand, as the kids these days might say, Leon is also totally cringe. Maybe it’s just the burgeoning antinatalist in me, but are men really as eager, as downright over the top desperate, to have a kid as Leon? The dude wants nothing more in life than to make his wife into breeding stock that he keeps track of her periods and hounds her for when they can try again (like, immediately after her miscarriage; Martha’s barely changed out of her bloody panties before he’s trying to knock her up again). His obsession with her fertility and bringing another child into the world almost makes your most virulently Christian conservative pro-lifer look milquetoast.
Honestly, I wanted to smack the both of them. Their relationship is brokered on the ludicrous idea that having a child is going to complete them as a couple (Leon already has a kid from a previous marriage, by the way, begging the question of why he needs another one). Granted, it’s fuel for all of Martha’s drama. There wouldn’t be very much at all to Carrying if both of them could relax and be normal for a minute. If this were a story in which this married couple simply lived for themselves and one another instead of trying to coat it all in this overly saccharine nonsense about how bringing another kid into the world is going to make everything super special and better in every way imaginable it would be a slim book indeed. I wanted to slap Martha for all the lying, the secrets, the manipulations, and the extreme lengths she goes to in order to hide herself from her husband. Leon, I wanted to hit for being a dumbass that’s bought into so much of heteronormative society’s pro-paternalism propaganda about how having kids is the most important thing anyone could ever do, as if it’s some rare, miraculous event that only billions of other people have managed to pull off.
I do wish, too, that Josephs had plumbed the depths of what’s really going on with Martha a little bit deeper. While we don’t need deep explanations for every inexplicable horror, Josephs is a little too reliant on coincidence and convenience. She’s content to let Martha simply be a genetic fluke, her pregnancy a one-in-a-billion stroke of luck. But that she also falls ill to a mysterious sickness that requires extreme and outright gross treatments is almost a step too far. Neither appear linked in anyway, except perhaps metaphorically, but I found myself needing more explanations behind the rapid-onset nutrient deficiency (ROND) that ails her. Josephs give us just enough scientific background to make her miraculous pregnancy defensible; ROND just kind of comes out of nowhere. Is it a result of her changing body? If so, why do the non-pregnant others she (secretly, of course) finds support amongst suffer similarly? Ultimately, it seems to exist in order to generate another level of conflict between Martha, Leon, and the world outside their troubled, and progressively troubling, marriage. It also allows additional motivation for Josephs to up the ante in terms of extremity. Let’s just say that the treatments for ROND are less AMA-approved and more RFK, Jr.
Between ROND and her, well, difficult pregnancy, Josephs mines the destruction wreaked upon a pregnant woman’s body to great effect. By book’s end, I was getting The Substance vibes, on top of trans Fight Club overtones. The sum total of Carrying is all about extremes – extreme behavior, going to extreme lengths to protect oneself and their offspring and to please those they care about most, and the extreme demands placed upon women, not only by society but by themselves, as well. Josephs approach to these topics doesn’t always fully mesh or reconcile well, but it’s all written with such fun, wit, and wry verve that you can’t help but root for both the author and her outlandish figurehead. Carrying is a violent collision of a book. It’s nasty and brutish, but you can’t stop yourself from turning the pages just to see how Josephs and Martha both are going to one-up themselves and find out what the hell is going to happen next.
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