Loved and Wanted

A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood

Christa Parravani

The acclaimed author of the memoir Her recounts her experience dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and the decisions faced by mothers in America.

"Haunting, wild, and quiet at once. A shimmering look at motherhood, in all its gothic pain and glory. I could not stop reading." —Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times– bestselling author of Three Women

"An inspired memoir—and a reminder of the serious mettle required of every ordinary woman." —Stephanie Danler, New York Times –bestselling author of Sweetbitter and Stray

Christa Parravani was forty years old, in a troubled marriage and financial straits, when she moved her family to Morgantown, West Virginia, feeling lucky to have landed a teaching job at the local university and hopeful that a professor's salary and health insurance might set her young family on a steady path. At first, with terrific new friends and beautiful surroundings, Christina's optimism looked sensible; but just a year after the birth of her second child, she became pregnant again. She sought an abortion. And in the weeks, then months, that followed, nurses misdirected her and doctors avoided her to the point of ultimately failing to provide Christa with reproductive choice. By the time she understood that she would need to leave West Virgina to obtain a safe, legal (though expensive) abortion, she felt it was too late for her, her pregnancy too far along.

She gave birth to a beautiful baby boy—and another terrifying education began: available healthcare was cruelly insufficient to her newborn's needs; indeed, environmental degradation and poor health care were endangering all of Christa's children.

Loved and Wanted is the moving story of a woman's love for her children and a bracing look at the tough choices women are forced to make every day in a nation where policies leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes for their children's lives.

"Reveals the cost to us all when we fail to openly personalize the politics of abortion in America." — The New York Times Book Review

"Parravani's narrative is an American story. It doesn't just hit close to the bone; it reveals the skeleton." — Los Angeles Review of Books

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Acknowledgments
• Also by Christa Parravani
• Praise for Loved and Wanted
• About the Author
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright