Roxy Dunn’s As Young As This and the novels exploring the thirtysomething fertility question
Women are born with a lifetime’s supply of eggs: a finite number, estimated to be between 1 and 2 million, which declines every month. It’s a fact that springs into the mind of Margot, the protagonist of Roxy Dunn’s debut novel , around her 34th birthday. She’s struck by how unfair it is. “What a waste, all those eggs being available when you didn’t want them,” she thinks, “preparing your body to do something you hadn’t been in any way – aside from biologically – ready to do. How many are left inside you now?” Why, she wonders, hasn’t the female body somehow evolved to better accommodate a more modern timeline, one where many of us use our twenties as a test run for adulthood, settling down later than our parents did?
