ABSTRACT
In contrast to traditional surrogacy, gestational surrogacy does not involve genetic material (an oocyte) of the gestational carrier. Thus, a woman who does not birth a child “can become a mother, too” based on her genetic parenthood. Within the broad genre of “mommy lit” or the “mo-moir”, “IP memoirs” – memoirs by women (Intended Parents) who have become mothers by employing a gestational carrier, are situated in a complex force field of personal trauma narrative, autopathography, matriography, scriptotherapy, and biography. By depicting and justifying their decision to take this road to parenthood, they tend to reinforce heteropatriarchal notions of gender essentialism and “new momism”, although they simultaneously advocate against normative understandings of motherhood by adding themselves as genetic mothers to the mother-child-dyad.
