When I first opened Colleen Clemens’s E=MC²: A Story of Fertility, Miscarriage, and Love, I felt that rare hum that tells you a book isn’t merely written—it’s lived. The title, with its nod to Einstein’s most famous equation, suggests transformation: how mass and energy are two expressions of the same truth. Colleen includes his words—“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing…”—and the quote lingers long after the page, as both scientific fact and spiritual koan.
Because what is grief, if not energy refusing to vanish? What is love, if not matter that cannot be destroyed?
Holding this book in my hands felt like the first time I held her daughter—not heavy in weight but heavy in meaning, intention, love. The kind of heaviness that makes you hold your breath without realizing it, that quiets a room.
Memoir has a special capacity to do that. It doesn’t tell you what to do; it lets you feel what it’s like to live through something that cannot be reduced to a lesson. A how-to book promises control; memoir offers communion. It lets us peek inside a story that resists resolution, that unfolds in language fine enough to hold both the exquisite and the unbearable.
Colleen’s writing has always been beautiful, but in E=MC² it has become something else—finer, sharper, more distilled. It reads like a stone polished by years of being turned over in the hand. Each sentence carries the weight of time, the refinement that only comes from letting the story work on you before you try to tell it.
There’s a generosity in that process. Writing, like conception, is not a straight line from intention to result. It’s a movement toward something you can’t yet see, a willingness to endure uncertainty for the sake of what might take shape. The book holds that tension with such grace.
And the subject—fertility, miscarriage, the body’s mysterious negotiations between hope and loss—is one of those experiences we rarely speak about, even though it’s everywhere. To write about it with this much honesty and care is an act of service. It brings what is hidden into the light without simplifying it, without smoothing over its rough edges.
E=MC² reminds me that love, like energy, is never lost. It only changes form—sometimes into grief, sometimes into art. And when we’re lucky, into both.
If you’ve ever walked this path yourself—or loved someone who has—this book is a companion, a witness, a hand extended in the dark. You can order E=MC²: A Story of Fertility, Miscarriage, and Love here, and I hope you do. Support the writers who tell the stories most people are afraid to tell.
And to my friend Colleen: what a wonder you’ve made.
