Nicole Louie's Other Like Me

Reviewed by Lindsey Harrington

(House of Anansi, 2024)

Have you ever struggled with something and sought out memoirs on the topic to help you through it? That’s where I found myself in the spring of 2020: a childfree-by-choice woman weeping on the kitchen floor over her best friend’s pregnancy. My first thought was, I’m losing her. My second one was, That’s a super fucked-up and selfish thing to think.

I began an exhaustive search for books about choosing a childfree life, unlike those around you. I came up mostly empty-handed. It was one of the factors that led me to write my own memoir on the subject (currently in the querying process, any agents who are reading this!).

Memoirs can provide commiseration, perspective, and hope when we find ourselves in challenging situations. They provide a window into another person as they find the narrative thread of their lives and make sense of it, while providing you the opportunity to do the same. There is something so powerful and healing about seeing your reality reflected on the page.

Since the climax of my personal struggle, the topic of being childfree has exploded in the collective conscious. JD Vance’s numerous comments about childless cat ladies came to light. There was a great Republican pile-on against Kamala Harris for never having given birth (though she is a stepmother). There are podcasts, content creators, and films on the subject. And of course, books. A lot of books. There’s Women Without Kids: the Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisters by Ruby Warrington, Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life by Maria Coffey, and even Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten. In the fiction realm, we have offerings like Stillborn by Guadalupe Nettel and Fledging by Rose Diell. People are talking about being childfree more and in a more nuanced way. If only I had my crisis a little later!

But none of these books touched me in quite the same way as Nicole Louie’s Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children. The memoir follows Louie’s life with a focus on how she realized she didn’t want children and her journey to understand that choice, so infrequently depicted—let alone celebrated—in society or its media. Right from the opening pages, she treats the stories of her subjects and herself with gentleness and care—something I rarely showed myself.

Through her tumultuous childhood, coming of age, marriage, divorce, multiple out-of-country moves, and other life events, we follow Nicole as she begins seeking out and interviewing other childfree women. This helps her process her feelings and gain understanding of her own childfree life.

As I devoured chapter after chapter, a thought continually bubbled to the surface, she’s so much like me. It seemed that Louie and I had lived parallel lives on different continents. Sure, Louie is a trilingual, globetrotting freelancer and I am a unilingual uni-country bureaucrat—but I was struck by our similarities more than our differences. We both grew up in Catholic settings with nuns for teachers. We both poured a lot of time and energy into careers but found our true purpose in the written word. We both placed importance on the milestone of marriage in lieu of having kids. And most importantly, we both knew we didn’t want kids, yet debated our decision due to personal and societal pressures—up to the point of making ourselves ill.

Sometimes Louie strays into more telling and less showing—about her life and especially in her retelling of the stories of her interviewees. Without a memorable depiction, those fourteen other women have mostly faded from my recollection. I never felt part of their experience. I couldn’t see what they saw, hear what they heard, or feel what they felt. Maybe the number of interviewees could have been cut by half, and more fully rendered.

I would have liked to be immersed in scenes more throughout the book—not to say I never was. I swung in the mouldy hammock in Louie’s small childhood bedroom, and shivered through her frozen, isolating years in Sweden. But I wanted more. I wanted to walk through the estates of childfree women in England that she visited and to sit at the tense family dinners when she was visiting in Brazil. She accomplishes this more in the later chapters of the book, and no surprise, that’s my favorite section.

When I finished this book, I found myself weeping once again, like I did on the kitchen floor four years ago. But this time, they were healing tears of compassion and love for Louie, for myself, and for others like us in a society like this. I would recommend Others Like Me to anyone who grappled with their choice to remain childfree, as well as to the loved ones of childfree folks, so they may understand the experience in a more visceral way.
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Representation matters. Our stories matter. And I am so glad Nicole Louie has shared her story, and the stories of fourteen other childfree women with the world. 

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Lindsey Harrington is a Nova Scotian writer with Newfoundland roots. She’s longlisted for CBC’s Nonfiction Prize, shortlisted for Fiddlehead’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, and won the Rita Joe Poetry Prize. Her current projects include a short story collection about breakups and a memoir about being childfree. Learn more about Lindsey at https://www.lindseyharrington.com/