Allen Ginsberg once described "Howl" as “a promotion of frankness, about any subject.” He might have made people uncomfortable with his words, but he also made us think deeply. In Oprah's world, we're supposed to pull up our socks and put a smiley face on any subject that makes people uneasy.

I was riveted last night by James Franco's performance in the film "Howl," and listened intently to the legal arguments that led a judge to declare that Ginsberg's work had a “redeeming social importance” and should not be categorized as obscene.

In his closing argument, attorney Jake Ehrlich famously stated, "Let there be light. Let there be honesty ... Let there be honest understanding."

The call for honest understanding today has been supplanted by a rush to find and highlight saccharin Disney endings, "and then they lived happily ever after," reflecting the dubious pop culture construct of "closure."

Nowhere today is this more apparent than watching television interviews.  Reality being a tough pill to swallow, society wants nothing more than to find and dispense a Prozac equivalent; the happy pill. This is most evident when it comes to grief, especially when it concerns "disenfranchised grief" -- losses that don't even make society's list of acceptable grief-worthy subjects. Infertility being tops among them. 

I watched the movie "Howl" through the lens of an infertile woman who has wrestled with being an outsider in a "mom-centric" society. Ginsberg's angst -- his rebelling against conformity -- resonated in a familiar way.  I've also spent the past few weeks reliving my howl experience.  As the featured author of Silent Sorority in an online book club, I've been exchanging thoughts with the participants on the raw visceral emotional toll of infertility. 

There is a howl, a deep, primal sound that accompanies the worst of infertility. It wells up and finds release only in the solitude of a woman's restroom or in the privacy of one's home.  It's a plaintiff wail that jars even the sensibility of the woman from whom it escapes. It's a haunting, unworldly sound.

As I re-read Silent Sorority, I exchanged ideas with a new set of women facing, for the first time, their own howls. I raised the concept of "disenfranchised grief" and the particular challenges associated with it. In a comment, one book club participant brought to light this astute observation:

“Have you watched a sad episode on Oprah before? The guest will tell a horrendous story--like how he and his wife and children were swept away in a flood and only he survived--and he'll cry while telling the story and Oprah will cry while listening to it and the audience will sob and nod. But then--as if the story had never been told, Oprah will chime in with, 'But tell us what you brought away from all this. Talk about the hope and life you have now.' And suddenly there's this huge shift and all of a sudden the studio turns lighter and the guest does what Oprah wants: that is, to end on something beautiful and happy and light. Viola! Grief is over! The end. We can all go home feeling good about ourselves. It's so strange to me that we can't all simply honor people's feelings and 'sit' with someone and his or her sadness for a little longer, for as long as is needed.

And disenfranchised grief? That doesn't even earn a spotlight. When infertility is on television, it's rarely about the grief part. It usually starts with the positive, brushes on the sadness, and goes right back to the positive: 'Jack and Jill are now the parents of three rambunctious triplets. Life in their household is full of shrieks and crying and Cheerios crunched into the carpet, but Jack and Jill wouldn't have it any other way....when they married 12 years ago, they imagined they'd get pregnant right away, but after a long struggle...and now they're a family of five...' "

Grief or alienation -- and the howls that accompany these experiences -- merit some reflection, exposition and discussion in their rawest form. It is only in knowing deeply and honestly confronting them that we can learn and come to terms with that pain.

Meanwhile, as the film credits rolled last night, I couldn't help but  wonder what might have happened if Oprah had had the opportunity to interview Allen Ginsberg.

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Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of the award-winning book Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost and Found.