Imogen in Waiting is a deeply personal and intellectually fearless memoir about motherhood, inherited risk and the moral complexity of modern reproduction.

At twenty-six, Lindsay Bartels is diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer and learns she carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, significantly increasing her lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancer and raising the possibility of passing that mutation onto future children. Years later, after undergoing IVF with preimplantation genetic testing, she and her husband are left with three viable embryos: two healthy male embryos, and one female embryo carrying BRCA1. Imogen.

Told directly to that embryo, Imogen in Waiting moves beyond illness memoir into the emotional and ethical terrain of genetic selection, asking what it means to make decisions about life, suffering, risk and responsibility in an age where medicine can increasingly predict — but not resolve — uncertainty.

Part literary memoir, part exploration of reproductive ethics, the book examines the hidden emotional labour carried by women navigating hereditary illness, fertility treatment and motherhood under the weight of medical knowledge. Rather than offering easy answers, Lindsay sits inside the ambiguity of these questions with honesty, tenderness and remarkable clarity.

At its heart, Imogen in Waiting is not only about cancer or IVF, but about agency, love, fate and the limits of control — and what it means to live fully in the shadow of what we know may come.