Season upon Season

Three winters, two springs, two falls, two summers: the events of Teri Vlassopoulos’s Living Expenses unfold over nine seasons. Each reflects time’s passage in the usual ways: the weather changes, the days get longer and then shorter, and the holidays mark another year’s end. The seasons are also charged with feeling — hope, disappointment, longing, and excitement — since this is, above all, a novel about trying to have a baby. It’s also about time, measured in weeks and months, and about the body, governed by its own mysterious ebbs and flows.

The story begins in early winter. The narrator is Laura, a thirty-four-year-old editor at a food magazine. Her husband, Joe, is a lawyer who also hosts a podcast about municipal politics. They met and married young, pursuing travel and hobbies, like Laura’s once popular food blog, before settling down in Toronto. As Laura celebrates Christmas with her mom and sister, Claire, she wonders if she’s pregnant; something feels different.

It’s not to be, at least not this time. “As soon as I allowed myself to think about having a baby,” she says, “I was flooded with the feeling that we were participating in something bigger than us, something mystical, like we were finally allowing the grandiose workings of the entire universe to unfold within my body. But since then, I’d found my actual body hard to parse.”

In the early seasons of the story, Laura and Joe try to conceive the low-intervention way, whether it’s stumbling tipsily into each other’s arms after a work party or scheduling sex based on a fertility app. Gradually they venture deeper into their new world, trying intrauterine insemination and then in vitro fertilization. Each stage comes with its own procedures and vocabulary: ovarian reserve, follicles, trigger shot.

Vlassopoulos observes Laura’s body closely. We learn to connect her lower back pain with the onset of her period; we watch as she monitors the quality of her cervical mucus. There’s nothing transgressive or prurient about these bodily descriptions, though even Laura must remind herself that her physicality “isn’t gross.” She tells herself that “these are normal bodily secretions that society has conditioned me to feel alienated from.”

Laura’s intimate perspective extends to the dialogue, which feels authentic, if not always engaging. “I might take a pregnancy test in the morning,” she tells Joe after they have Claire over for dinner. The conversation continues:

Laura’s retrospection probes her past, her relationships, and, with particular poignancy, her thoughts on aging. Reflecting on her youth, she thinks, “I missed it, suddenly, the way time felt then, how vast it had seemed, how so much could happen in a night.” Even so, Living Expenses is largely grounded in the present and proximate, as if Laura’s attempts to conceive have necessitated this close‑up view. When Claire and a colleague co-found a tech start‑up aimed at women called the Lookout —“as in a high‑up place to look out onto the world”— Laura says, “Their ability to think so broadly about the world was enviable when I instead felt so focused on myself on a cellular level, so low down, so unable to see beyond the constraints of my body.”

While Vlassopoulos’s focus may not be cellular, it’s also not lookout high. In another book, Claire’s start‑up, whose mission is to make women’s lives easier, from dating to parenting, would be fodder for a biting critique: Is the answer really to commodify every aspect of our experiences? Living Expenses is ambivalent on this issue, and in the end, the business is presented as just another exciting endeavour, like the new relationship Laura and Claire’s mother pursues with a man she meets on a dating app.

That being said, the novel is keenly aware of capital’s power. From the opening pages, finances set Laura and Claire, who are often mistaken for twins, apart from one another. Claire buys their mother an iPad for Christmas, departing from their “usual script,” in which time spent together is valued more than extravagant gifts, causing Laura to feel “a twinge of discomfort.” Claire’s tech job gives her endless benefits; in contrast, Laura is “mostly expected to be grateful just to have a job.” The sisters’ financial discrepancies mirror that of their divorced parents: their mother immigrated to Canada from the Philippines, working as a cleaner and then managing a hospital’s laundry service, while their white father enjoyed a career as an executive who could afford to shower them with money.

Reproduction, too, has an uneven cost. When Laura and Joe meet with their new fertility doctor at a stylish clinic with Scandinavian furniture and leafy views, they’re told the office can “price out scenarios.” Joe ruefully comments to Laura, “Of course they have an accounting department.” As the struggling couple stretch their finances thin, Claire confides that she’s thinking of freezing her eggs. It’s a “competitive perk” covered by her benefits, so why not?

If Living Expenses is about time and the body, it’s also about money: what’s needed to enter this world and what’s needed to survive in it.