As Natalie Portman enters the final trimester of her pregnancy, her father, a reproductive specialist, is shopping his debut novel. From micropenises to incestuous in vitro, Marlow Stern unearths the most ridiculous parts of the self-described “fertility-thriller.”
While tearfully accepting her Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan, a pregnant Natalie Portman thanked “my beautiful love Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed the film and has now given me my most important role of my life.” But before gushing about her fiancé, Portman thanked her parents “for giving [her] the opportunity to work from such an early age.” Around the same time, Portman’s father, Dr. Avner Hershlag was working too… on his self-published debut novel, Misconception.
One of the country’s most renowned reproductive specialists, the Yale-educated Hershlag is Director of the Donor Egg and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, Director of Fertility Laboratories, and Medical Director of the In Vitro Fertilization Program at the Center for Human Reproduction in North Shore, Long Island. Clearly, he knows a lot about making babies and hopefully for Portman, her situation is far from the plot of Misconception.
Dr. Hershlag’s debut novel is set in Washington D.C. and centers on Dr. Anya Krim, the fertility specialist for the President and his wife. She delivers a deformed baby with “ambiguous genitalia” who later goes missing and its mother is found dead. Krim then discovers Megan Tanner, a senator’s daughter who has been in a coma for two years, is also pregnant. Senator Tanner is the Majority Whip, and chairman of a senate committee overhearing a controversial Embryonic Stem Cell Bill in Congress. If Dr. Krim—a rape victim herself—didn’t have enough on her petri dish, the First Lady’s last-ditch effort to conceive goes haywire when her embryos are kidnapped from the lab.
And that’s only the beginning.
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