Fallow by Sarah Anderson

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 15, 2026

Fallow is a light-hearted examination of surrogacy — and more broadly, the desire of employers to avoid granting maternity or FMLA leave to women who are about to give birth. I chuckled enough to make the book worthwhile, even if its examination of the targeted problem could have been more substantial.

When Fallow begins, Natalie Gallagher is in her early twenties. Natalie doesn’t like to work. Her job history is checkered; she’s probably never earned much more than minimum wage. She scores points for her honest rejection of values like hard work, motivation, and self-sufficiency, even if the absence of those values might make a reader less sympathetic about her self-inflicted woes.

Natalie needs a significant income to pay her student loans but has no desire to earn one. The highlight of her current gig in an HR call center is a guy who repeatedly calls in to complain, in lurid detail, about sexual harassment before masturbating as she repeats the details of the harassment to him. The call center job “confirmed two important truths: that there is no such thing as a good job, and that I had no interest in working. I wanted a life free of wake-up alarms. I wanted no threat of night shifts.” Natalie is lazy but her lack of ambition isn’t surprising, given the dead-end jobs for which she seems destined.

Because the call center job doesn’t pay enough to cover her expenses, Natalie also sells her plasma at the blood bank where her sister works. A nurse there shares an ad with Natalie that promises a generous salary for an applicant who has a “healthy lifestyle,” “birthing hips,” and “discretion.” Those qualifications are sufficiently vague that Natalie decides to apply.

The job turns out to be birth surrogacy. Natalie will be expected to carry another woman’s embryo to term while following a strict diet, exercise regime, and meditation schedule. She gets a bonus for a natural birth. Perks include a tenancy in a furnished luxury condo and a personal assistant who makes sure Natalie sticks to her exercise schedule and doesn’t eat or drink anything that might harm a fetus. A couple of babies will pay off Natalie’s loans. A few more will relieve her of the burden of work for years.

The corporation that hires Natalie makes surrogacy available to high-value female employees who might otherwise take a maternity leave or miss work because of a pregnancy-related illness. With no need for physical recovery, women return to work more quickly — “the goal is to reduce that critical window can from birth to office return.” This seems like an entirely plausible (albeit heartless) scheme to maximize employee productivity. I’m surprised Elon Musk hasn’t thought of it. Perhaps he’s trying instead to develop a robot that will replace birth mothers.

Natalie regards the gig as ideal. As the story moves along, Natalie has several babies. She takes to pregnancy naturally and makes use of the six month “fallow” period between pregnancies to eat unhealthy meals, party until dawn, and have random sexual encounters before she starts to get healthy again. Natalie loves her fallow period and its “three distinct phases: feast, fuck around, and get fertile.”

Natalie forms no particular attachment to the babies she delivers, although one employee spends so much time with her that Natalie believes the woman is sincere when she invites Natalie to spend summers at her home in the south of France. That invitation evaporates when the delivery, through no fault of Natalie, does not go as planned.

Natalie’s last pregnancy involves surrogacy for an executive named Jackie who is extraordinarily clingy. When Jackie loses her job, the corporation expects Natalie to make a choice that will devastate Jackie. The choice Natalie makes changes the course of the novel, starting with Natalie’s kidnapping and her forced residency in a commune. The change of direction sends the story into unexpected territory, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Sarah Anderson skewers corporate employers with her description of Natalie’s draconian contract terms and her NDAs. The novel’s satirical approach to surrogacy as a corporate benefit captures the reality that HR departments are more interested in saving money than in benefiting employees. The problems that pregnant employees encounter in the workplace are serious, but Fallow substitutes eye-rolling satire for a serious examination of pregnancy discrimination. That’s not necessarily a criticism — the novel is meant to be funny, not academic — but readers who hope for a more cogent discussion of the targeted issue might be disappointed.

Anderson also satirizes the sort of people who join communes to avoid the grasp of capitalism, then quarrel about how to make money and share labor. Living in the commune isn’t as nice as living in a luxury condo, although Natalie’s primary objection is that she’s expected to work for her daily meals. Natalie is a bit embarrassed by the sincerity of the commune dwellers, but she has no better option. Or, at least, she doesn’t want to expend the energy that leaving would require.

Fallow worked for me because Natalie, while not quite endearing, manages to make laziness seem like a virtue. Natalie’s ability to ride the waves of life as they wash over her is impressive. Her dedication to making the most of her fallow periods is almost admirable. Natalie does little to fight back when the company that hires her inevitably decides to screw her over, just as she makes little effort to escape when she is kidnapped, but she eventually realizes that she needs to make choices about her life rather than living with the choices that are forced upon her. In the end, Natalie is such a likable character that Anderson had me rooting for her.

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