Mosaic - by Laura Gaddis (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mosaic is a story of exploration and self-identification, of grief, relationships, tackling mental health, and how to walk through difficult times when there is nowhere else to go. The story follows Laura, who along with her husband Jason, embarked on having a baby, only to go on a journey that spanned over five years. Over this time, Laura learned the hard truth about pregnancy loss, the medical field, and how to negotiate unforeseen difficulties. She persevered through four high-risk pregnancies, with the last one being a pregnancy more successful than the rest. Yet, it posed many tribulations, launching Laura and her husband into the world of an unpredictable birth, fetal abnormalities, their premature baby, the NICU, and breath-holding. Through the story, the book delves into grief and resilience, and how they work together to get Laura through a difficult time in her life. It shows how relying on her own mother also taught her how to enter motherhood for herself, no matter at what stage she considered herself to be a "mother." Mosaic explores how to use challenges to change us into better versions of ourselves.

Review Quotes

• Laura Gaddis went through it. She gets it. And she writes about it powerfully in Mosaic, her memoir of pregnancy, loss, hope, love, resilience, and joy. -Ann Hood, New York Times Bestselling author of Comfort and Fly Girl: A Memoir

• Gaddis tells her story with precise and beautiful language. But most profoundly, she chooses to tell that story through a collection of flickering, shimmering moments of loss and healing, profound sadness and intense joy. Mosaic is a remarkable yet relatable story of what can be learned from life's harshest moments. Gaddis's writing makes space for all of it to shine through.-Pepper Stetler, author of A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother's Reckoning with the IQ Test

• Mosaic made me want to curl up with a cup of tea and my cat, a bouquet of flowers and my journal nearby, which is another way of saying that Laura Gaddis's memoir opened my heart in unexpected ways to love and grief and joy. I found myself delighted with the book's inventive shape. To give loss its proper place in our lives does require new ways of telling our stories, and Gaddis shows us how to do this. Be prepared: you will be changed by this brave and tender memoir.- Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir

• Mosaic is a moving exploration of love, loss, and the delicate, yet unbreakable threads--or welds--that hold us to the ones we've lost and the ones who are present. This book illuminates the journey of living with grief while finding a way to keep hope alive. It is the story of a mother navigating the spaces between what could have been and what is. Gorgeous. Deeply moving. Incredibly felt. A story of learning to live with grief amidst love. Of what could have been and what is. If you've ever loved deeply or lost painfully, this book will resonate with you. Through the lens of motherhood, marriage, and infertility, the author creates a tender, bittersweet story, keeping the light on for all that we have lost. I cried along with Laura, held my heart with Laura, and felt made and remade by her words and her wisdom. She asks so many compelling questions, and the ways her marriage and her family are made is balm to a broken heart. There is so much love in this book. A beautiful book of motherhood, of loss, and how and why we risk heartbreak again and again. Though our personal stories are different, as a mother of a stillborn daughter, I could relate and felt seen and comforted by the pages.-TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos and Beheld