A sixteen-year-old girl’s road trip across the country to get an abortion becomes a transformative journey of vulnerability, strength, and above all, choice. From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World, this is both an achingly tender love story and a bold, badly needed battle cry about bodily autonomy and the experiences that connect us.

Ivy can’t entirely believe it when the plus sign appears on the test. She didn’t even know it was possible from . . . what happened. But it is, and now she is, and instead of spending the summer working at the local drugstore and swooning over her boyfriend, Lorenzo, suddenly she’s planning a cross-country road trip to her grandmother’s house on the West Coast, where she can legally obtain an abortion.

Escaping her small Texas town and the judgment of her friends and neighbors, Ivy hits the road with Lorenzo, who, determined to make the best of their “abortion road trip love story,” has transformed the journey into a whirlwind tour of the world: all the way from Paris, Texas, to Rome, Oregon . . . and every rest-stop diner and corny roadside attraction along the way.

And while Ivy can’t run from the incessant pressure of others’ opinions about her body or from her own expectations and insecurities, she discovers a new world of healing and hope. As the women she encounters share their stories, she chips away at the stigma, silence, and shame surrounding reproductive rights while those collective experiences guide her to her own rightful destination.

Listen to a clip of one of my most FAVORITE audiobooks, narrated by the incredible Jorjeane Marie, and chosen as an Amazing Audiobook 0f 2024 by the American Library Association!

A Story That Belongs to All of Us

     I learned something profound while writing Plan A: One in four women (along with transgender and nonbinary people who can become pregnant) will have an abortion.

     One in four.

     It’s a number that has stayed essentially the same for nearly a hundred and fifty years, since anyone thought to count. One in four today. One in four for more than a century. One in four in your family history, one in four in mine, whether we hear those stories or not.

     I was unaware of this statistic when I began writing Plan A, the story of sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries, who makes her way from Paris, Texas to Rome, Oregon to get an abortion. What I did know was that unprecedented restrictions on abortions were creeping into law in early 2021, even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I was very worried about the ramifications. I decided to write with that one reader in my mind, the one who many writers, especially YA writers, hold in their thoughts when they work – the young person who badly needs the support of our words. I wanted to offer a realistic, compassionate story, where the abortion itself is a safe and drama-free medical procedure, as they are. A story that was free, too, of the “will she or won’t she” that often drives the plot of such books. In Plan A, as the title asserts, she will. She intends to, and does.

     I held other readers in my mind, as well, particularly the ones who might disagree with my views, and I made what I hoped were considered, respectful, and purposeful decisions about Ivy’s story and how it would be told. Primarily, it felt crucial for Ivy to speak in her own, first-person voice. It’s harder to dehumanize a kind, funny, tender-hearted human being, who shares their fears and vulnerabilities honestly. Books are empathy builders, and a reader isn’t just in someone else’s shoes – they’re in that person’s thoughts and feelings. Their body. Their choices.

     I made another early decision in the writing of Plan A: to share the abortion stories in my own family history. As Ivy travels across the country, the women in her life - friends, mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers – open up to her about their abortions. Those women are my women, my bedrock, the ones on my own family tree. Many of those women I’d only known as a child, or never knew at all, gone a long time before I was even born, including one great grandmother who died having an abortion, leaving behind two little boys, one who would become my mother’s absent father. Connecting my work to emotional truths in my own life is essential to me. I believe in the power and universality of the personal.

     But then I learned the extent of that universality. One in four – a figure unchanged for centuries, which sits next to the statistic that does change: the number of women who die when abortions are illegal. These were not just truths of my own history; they were truths of everyone’s history. They belonged to the one reader I was writing the book for, and to the readers of Plan A who’d disagree with my beliefs. They belonged to the young women denied their rights in 1873 and in 2023; to the people holding the signs, and the women holding the positive pregnancy tests. Those truths belong to partners and family members and friends, as well. To the many people who accompanied their daughters and sisters and friends to clinics from the 1800’s on. To the men and the lawmakers. To the little children left behind, who would one day become fathers themselves. And it belongs to the many women who’ve already opened up to me about their own abortions after hearing about Plan A, women I’ve known for years and women I’ve just met, echoing Ivy’s own experience of the secret sharing that’s been going on for generations. “Sometimes,” Ivy’s Aunt Betts says to her, “I look at this tree, and I think our whole family history is people having sex, women and girls getting pregnant, having or not having babies. But then I realize, that’s every family’s history.”  

As I wrote this book, I could feel all of the human beings throughout time who have made the decision about their own Plan A. I could feel their pain, their relief, their hope, their struggle. Their choices. Like Ivy, they are, or were, funny, tender, vulnerable human beings, full of love and generosity, confusion and fury. One, two, three, four. Her and her and him and them. I, you, we, all of us - confronting the demands of other people about our very own bodies, whether in a whisper or a shout or a silent act. Facing the command of Here’s what you will do, and saying something that should be extraordinarily unremarkable but is instead astonishingly brave: I get to choose. I do. 

  —Deb Caletti March, 2024

Planning a road trip… From my notebooks.

Scenes from an Abortion Roadtrip Love Story…

“Huh,” Lorenzo says. "Christmas Road in Christmas Valley. I was at least expecting a Santa Claus statue. Or those stores full of nutcrackers and Christmas shit even though it’s July.”

“Not an elf in sight,” I agree.

“Not a single candy cane. A candy cane is bare minimum Christmas.”

It’s so true. Especially those tiny ones in rectangular cellophane wrappers, strung together like an endless chain of bad ideas. “They’ve got sand dunes somewhere around here,” I report from my phone, since wifi has, poof, appeared. “Also, a place called Crack in the Ground.”

We giggle.

“There’s a dinosaur in front of the Ox-Bow Café, but Lorenzo just walks right past it. It’s one of those places that would usually make him super happy.  It has a tall sign that truckers can see from the freeway, featuring a steer head lit up in red A couple of semis are parked in front. Inside, I see Formica tables with swivel stools anchored down around them, and baskets of food on red and white checked paper. Red and white checked paper means get ready, because the food is going to be awesome.”

Down the path, it’s easy to tell when we’ve reached it. Fenced off in a patch of grass, there it is - this strange beast, an enormous Sitka spruce with no central trunk. Instead, many trunks extend and then rise from a singular spot, resembling an octopus, sure, but maybe even more, an entire forest in one tree.  It’s ancient, the sign says, and the forces that have shaped it are a mystery. 

“Two hundred and fifty to three hundred years old,” Lorenzo says.

Of course I think of it, that tree on Aunt Betts’ wall, a single trunk with many branches, while here, it’s many trees all in one. I think of all of the women of my tree who stand or have stood as silent as this one, standing next to other silent trees in other families, and on and on and on, in Rome and in Rome, Lima and Lima, Paris and Paris.

You asked for it: The PLAN A playlist!