Sara Bareilles Reveals a Miscarriage After IVF — What She Said About Grief and the Future She Imagined
Sara Bareilles is speaking more openly about a part of her fertility journey that does not have a neat ending. In a new interview tied to her album and documentary Good Grief, the singer said she experienced her first miscarriage earlier in 2026 after multiple unsuccessful rounds of IVF.
The headline is personal, but the reason the story is resonating goes beyond celebrity news. Bareilles has spent the past two years trying to become a parent, while also grieving the death of her close friend Gavin Creel. In recent interviews, she has described the fertility process as a place where control, hope, disappointment and uncertainty can exist at the same time.
That makes this less a story about whether one treatment worked and more a story about what happens when the future you pictured begins to change shape.
Did Sara Bareilles have a miscarriage after IVF?
Yes. Bareilles said she experienced her first miscarriage earlier this year. She has also said that she and her husband, actor Joe Tippett, have spent roughly two years trying to have a child and that several IVF attempts were unsuccessful.
She has been unusually direct about the uncertainty of that process. Rather than telling the story from the safe distance of a happy ending, Bareilles has talked about being in what she described as the “messy middle”: still hoping, still making decisions and still not knowing what the final version of the story will be.
She has also discussed considering an egg donor as a possible next step. In Good Grief, that possibility becomes part of a larger emotional question: how do you grieve one version of parenthood while remaining open to another?
Why is “Good Grief” part of this story?
Good Grief is not only about fertility. Bareilles has said the project grew from several kinds of loss, including the 2024 death of her close friend and fellow Broadway artist Gavin Creel. As she worked on the album, grief became the thread connecting experiences that initially seemed separate.
That matters because grief is often easier for other people to understand when there is one visible event and one socially recognized script. A death has rituals. A funeral tells everyone that something happened. Fertility loss and prolonged uncertainty can be harder to explain because much of what is being mourned may be private: a pregnancy, a plan, a timeline, a version of family life that had already become emotionally real.
Why can the loss of an imagined future hurt so much?
We do not only become attached to what has already happened. We become attached to what we expect to happen.
People picture birthdays that have not arrived yet. They imagine what a child might call them. They calculate ages, bedrooms, school years and holidays. None of those imagined scenes is a contract with the future, but that does not make the attachment unreal.
So when the future changes, the grief can feel confusing. A person may think, Am I allowed to be this sad about something that never fully became what I pictured?
The answer does not need to be measured against someone else’s loss. Grief is not a competition. And it does not become more legitimate only when the outside world can see it.
OliviaC: some losses have no public ceremony
OliviaC reflection: Some of the hardest losses are the ones that leave you wondering whether you have permission to call them losses at all.
There may be no room full of people bringing food. No obituary. No obvious date when everyone understands why you are quiet. Sometimes there is simply a future you had been carrying in your mind, and then the future changes.
What I find meaningful in Bareilles’ story is not that she has discovered the “right” way to handle that. She has not presented a clean answer. She is still inside the uncertainty. That is precisely why people may recognize themselves in it.
Recovery and rebuilding often contain a similar kind of grief—not because fertility struggle and addiction are the same, but because changing a life can require mourning a version of the future you once assumed was yours. A relationship may not return to the way it was. A career may take a different shape. A family may have to imagine a new route forward.
Starting again is not always choosing a brand-new dream with enthusiasm. Sometimes it begins with admitting that the old dream mattered.
If you are trying to rebuild without pretending the earlier version of your life meant nothing, How to Begin Again Without Shame explores that tension more directly.
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Sources
People — Sara Bareilles on miscarriage, IVF and fertility struggles
The New York Times — Sara Bareilles and Good Grief
NPR/NCPR — Sara Bareilles on what gets left out of fertility conversations
Wikimedia Commons — archival image and license