"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 A stressed family, an unplanned pregnancy, and a painful, if liberating, awakening from the author of the lauded memoir Her Christa Parravani was forty years old, in a troubled marriage, and in bad financial straits when she learned she was pregnant with her third child. She and her family were living in Morgantown, West Virginia, where she had taken a professorial position at the local university. Haunted by a childhood steeped in poverty and violence and by young adult years rocked by the tragic death of her identical twin sister, Christa hoped her professor’s salary and health care might set her and her young family on a safe and steady path. Instead, one year after the birth of her second child, Christa found herself pregnant again. Six weeks into the pregnancy, she requested an abortion. And in the weeks, then months, that followed, nurses obfuscated and doctors refused outright or feared being found out to the point of, ultimately, becoming unavailable to provide Christa with reproductive choice. By the time Christa understood that she would need to leave West Virginia to obtain a safe, legal abortion, she’d run out of time. She had failed to imagine that she might not have access to reproductive choice in the United States, until it was too late for her, her pregnancy too far along. So she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Keats. And another frightening education began: available healthcare was dangerously inadequate to her newborn son’s needs; indeed, environmental degradations and poor healthcare endangered Christa’s older children as well. Loved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman’s love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women leave them without sufficient agency over their bodies, their futures, and even their hopes for their children’s lives. "[Parravani] dissects the complexity of choice, how our own trauma and relationships inform it, as well as policy and access. She reveals the cost to us all when we fail to openly personalize the politics of abortion in America." ― The New York Times Book Review "Achingly personal. . . . [Parravani reveals] the ways in which the American health care system denies women agency over their own bodies and their children's futures." ― Entertainment Weekly "From the guts. Parravani takes her life in hand and confronts the institutions and attitudes that oppress her and countless women just like her. . . . 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 “Searing. . . . A devastating indictment of how environmental contamination and inadequate healthcare harmed [Parravani’s] children born in West Virginia. This is a powerful account of what many women face in the U.S. today.” ― Publishers Weekly "[A] luminous, complex story . . . visceral, yet metaphoric . . A welcome addition to women's narratives. . . In a time when the wars waged on women’s sexual bodies are happening in multiple, intersecting ways, especially through individual organizations and agencies’ attempts to stop women from asking for or receiving what they are legally allowed to request, Parravani’s story is cautionary and a call to action; as personal as it is political." ― Library Journal "What emerges is not simply a portrait of Parravani's difficult marriage, painful health issues and stressful financial burdens but a complex picture of the unsayable circumstances that shape one woman's relationship to her body, to her choice to have children or not and the cost of that decision. In saying the unsayable, Parravani is unflinching and brave." ― BookPage "Intimate, affecting. . . . A candid, personal look at the political and cultural forces shaping women’s lives." ― Kirkus Reviews "Unflinchingly honest, Christa Parravani lays bare the terrors, exhaustion and the great sacrifice of a parent trying to provide a healthy life for her family. An inspired memoir―and a reminder of the serious metal required of every ordinary woman." ―Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter and Stray "Groundbreaking. . . . A fierce and essential explication of the many forces that constrain reproductive freedom. In a country riven by the need to reduce, to simplify, to ignore, Loved and Wanted challenges us to pay attention, to hold complexity, and to understand why we have to do better." ―Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back "Christa Parravani is one of our great memoirists. Loved and Wanted is a breathtaking book of life and death. Parravani provides a firsthand account from the front lines of a woman's