As the children of a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. That is, until Claire moves to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Enter the slow, hopeful, devastating process of fertility treatments. While Laura prepares for IVF, Claire has her own encounter with the fertility industry.

Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters’ lives, from communication to reproduction.

Teri Vlassopoulos has published two books, a collection of short stories, Bats Or Swallows (Invisible Publishing), which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and a novel, Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing). Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Quarantine Review, Open Book, and more. She also publishes a regular Substack newsletter, Bibliographic. She lives in Toronto.

Teri Vlassopoulos' profile page

Praise for Teri Vlassopoulos:

“Vlassopoulos has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books

“Bats or Swallows manages to evoke not just the uncertainty and fear of young adulthood, but its magic and inexplicable excitement as well.”—Quill & Quire