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Michelle Obama says she felt “lost and alone” after suffering a miscarriage 20 years ago and she and Barack Obama underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive their two daughters. “We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well,” Mrs. Obama, 54, writes in her upcoming memoir. “We had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every worry and swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a miscarriage, which left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we felt.” (Kellman, 11/9)

“I felt lost and alone. I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” she said. She also said that both of her daughters, Sasha and Malia, were conceived through in vitro fertilization. “The biological clock is real,” she said, noting that she realized that when she was in her mid-30s. “We had to do IVF. I think it’s the worst thing that we do to each other as women, not share the truth about our bodies and how they work and how they don’t work.” (Reiss, 11/12)