You are warmly invited to join us for a webinar discussion with myself (Jody Day), Y.L. Wolfe and Fabiana Formica on topics arising from Fabiana’s memoir (published May 2025), Childless: A Woman and a Girl in a Man’s World, to take place on Zoom on Saturday, 19th July at 7pm BST.
Click here to register for the call, and/or to receive the recording the next day.
The call will be recorded if you can’t make it, and I’ll send out the video recording the next day to all who’ve registered. There will be a 15-minute Q&A at the end of the hour, and you are welcome to send in your questions ahead of time on your registration form.
‘Childless’ is self-published via Amazon and is available as a hardback, paperback and Kindle in most countries, including: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Italy (in English). As delivery times will vary, and to give you time to read the book before the call, please order your copy as soon as you can. (And if you don’t get to read it or finish it, please join us for the discussion anyway, as we’ll be discussing broad themes arising from the book too).
I was honoured to be able to review the book ahead of publication and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, hence bringing together the author, Fabiana Formica and Y.L. Wolfe, one of the finest thinkers and writers about the single, childless experience I know, for what I hope will be a fascinating and meaningful discussion.
For too long, the feminist aspects of the single-not-by-choice and childless-not-by-choice have been neglected in mainstream discourse, with the exceptions of Prof. Gail Letherby, Dr Ketaki Chowkani and author Donna Ward. This persists despite UN estimates that single (‘unmarried or not in a union’) women make up 49% of UK women aged 15-49 (up from 27% in the 1970s), 48% of US women (up from 33%) and 46% of Italian women (up from 36%).
There have been some excellent books on the female single experience recently, including Nicola Slawson’s (2025) Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms and Lucy Meggeson’s forthcoming (June 19th 2025), Shiny Happy Singles: Celebrating the Joy of Independent Childfree Lives, (both of which include mentions/interviews with me), and which speak to a broader range of experiences, including choosing non-parenthood, non-partnerhood, or single motherhood by choice.
What makes Fabiana’s book important, in my opinion, is that it focuses on the experience of deeply desiring partnerhood and motherhood, and what it might mean to have this thwarted. Through a lens at times personal, therapeutic, philosophical and feminist, she seeks to understand why being a single non-mother in our society can impact the very foundations of our identity, worth and meaning as women. And, in Fabiana’s case, what it took her to find her way through this maze and make both sense and peace with her life.
This was my review:
How far are you willing to go to have a child? This is the question that this extraordinary memoir explores as Fabiana, an Italian-American-Romanian artist, actress, and writer in her mid-forties, contemplates whether she really will use her frozen eggs to have a child alone. Told in part through the letters she writes to her imaginary daughter Nia, and the often painful exhumation of family secrets and lies, Fabiana tries to make sense of what it means to be a childless and single woman in a patriarchal society, as well as what it means to her personally. A traumatic childhood is unpacked in unsparing detail, and her journey through therapy to heal it is quite unlike anything I’ve read outside of psychotherapeutic case studies, and even more powerful coming directly from the client. As the unmothered daughter of an unmothered daughter myself, I recognised much of the longing to love and be loved she projected onto her unborn daughter, the emotionally unavailable, damaged and damaging men she finds herself attracted to, and also to the raw courage of her healing process. By turns philosophical enquiry, unflinching memoir and feminist reportage, this profound book can be a challenging read, and is thus best taken slowly, allowing the depth of it to settle into your soul. An important book for all single women without children, whether by choice or chance, looking for a writer who can explore both the shadow and the light of that misunderstood experience. Ultimately, Childless is a book about healing intergenerational trauma, familial love and neglect, forgiveness and liberation. An extraordinary memoir that will stay with me for a long time.
Fabiana Formica is an Italian-Romanian-American writer, actress, and former news producer. Childless – A Woman and a Girl in a Man’s World is her first book. As an actress, she is best known to cult horror fans for her role as “Valentina” in the 1994 film Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man), which earned her a place in horror cinema history. She lives in Los Angeles and you can read more about her on her website at: https://fabianaformica.com/
Y.L. Wolfe is an American writer, artist, and photographer whose work explores what it means to be a woman “on the outside.” Her words and art reflect her journey into her second act as she ‘adventures, nests and raises hell in middle age’. She is the creatrix behind the photographic journey, Rising, and the author of Paris, My Love. She’s also the Wolfe behind Howl, a column about female sexual liberation. She writes a powerful Substack ‘On The Outside’ about the single, childless/free midlife experience at ylwolfe.substack.com and is rarely on Instagram @yl.wolfe and more frequently to be found on Substack’s own ‘Notes’ social media platform at @ylwolfe
Jody Day is an English/Irish psychotherapist and founded Gateway Women in 2011. She’s the author of Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (PanMac 2016/2020). A World Childless Week Ambassador since its inception in 2017, she was also a founding and former board member at the UK Charity Ageing Without Children, and is a former Fellow in Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School. Now in her early sixties, she is currently focused on her Gateway Elderwomen project, developing thinking and resources around ‘Elderhood without Motherhood’, incluidng a pilot project for ‘Alterkin’ (Alternative Kinship Network), creating a mutual-aid, hyper-local community of care for people ageing without children. After a lifetime in London, she lives in rural Ireland and is working on two new books. You can find her on Instagram @gatewaywomen and @apprenticecrone, and on Substack ‘Notes’ @jodyday
The Childless Collective hosts a subgroup for unpartnered, childless-not-by-choice women, with 200+ members. You can access/join that here. Gateway Women Masterclasses, hosted by Jody Day, are conversations with the leading writers, therapists, activists, healers, community-creators ders and change-makers in the childless community globally. To watch previous GW Masterclasses click here. To sign up to hear about future free GW Masterclasses, click here.
What's your experience?