Fallow is a near-future reproductive-capitalism satire about Natalie Gallagher, a woman who hates work so much that she signs a ten-year contract with a corporation to become its in-house gestational carrier. It wants to be a savage comedy about labor, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, corporate feminism, family, social media, surrogacy, class, burnout, utopian communes, and what it means to do “work” with a body. Mostly, it is a clever but loose and overstuffed novel that keeps dressing up the same joke in new maternity clothes: capitalism owns the womb, hippies own the guilt, and Natalie would still rather not have a real job.
The book opens with Natalie at a call center, uninsured, broke, and suffering from wisdom-tooth pain. She has always hated work. Her first job in a reptile store taught her that caring deeply for something can still get you punished: after she becomes excellent at keeping chameleons alive, she is fired for the “resource burden” of successfully producing baby chameleons. Later, at the call center, she takes whistleblower complaints from workers whose jobs have failed them in every imaginable way. The job is livable, flexible, and gossip-rich, but it does not include dental insurance.
Her looming dental bill pushes her toward side hustles: plasma donation, maybe OnlyFans, anything but a conventional job. Then she discovers an “Opportunities Portal” connected to the corporation where her sister works. The Company has a program called Genesis: a surrogacy benefit for elite employees, run like a glossy HR initiative. Natalie is recruited because she is young, healthy, unattached, and apparently willing. The contract is absurd and chilling: she agrees to serve as gestational carrier for seven viable pregnancies over no more than ten years, following elaborate rules about diet, toxins, exercise, supplements, emotions, furniture, sleep, travel, and bodily conduct. She will be paid handsomely, housed in a luxury condo, monitored by a doctor and handlers, and given dental insurance.
