Buffeted by one jaw-dropping obstacle after another, Orenstein seeks answers both medical and spiritual, all the while trying to save a marriage threatened by cycles, appointments, procedures, and disappointments. Her journey takes her around America and as far as East Asia - on the way she visits an ex-boyfriend who now has fifteen children; encounters 'parasite singles' in Tokyo, women who are rejecting marriage and motherhood in favour of shopping sprees and foreign travel; and shares stories with survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

The world's professional women are only now beginning to become aware of the risks and realities of 'having it all', and Orenstein's saga unfolds as infertility is developing into a boom industry, with over a million women a year seeking treatment. Waiting for Daisy is a profoundly honest, wryly funny report from the front, a story about doing all the things you swore you'd never do to get something you hadn't even been sure you wanted; it's about being a woman, about trying to become a mother, and above all, about the ambivalence, obsession and sacrifice that characterises the struggles of so many modern couples.

Peggy Orenstein is the author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap and Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, her work has also appeared in USA Today, Elle, Vogue and the New Yorker, among others. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Steven Okazaki, and their daughter, Daisy.