AVALANCHE
A Love Story
Julia Leigh
W W Norton & Company
133 pages; $23.95
On Fertility, Medicine and Motherhood
Belle Boggs
Graywolf Press
242 pages; $16
For several years I was a professor of creative writing at an English university, and a native habit of finding metaphors and similes in unlikely places occasionally led me to glimpse a strange half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Like the IVF industry, the creative writing business has many critics who deplore the notion that creativity can or should be taught and believe some central mystery of life is being violated therein. Part of the humiliation of being helped to bring forth what should emerge naturally (or, by implication, not at all) is the speed with which the most generous impulse - to create - begins to look like the most selfish.
The analogy between creative writing and fertility is not entirely facile: The story of IVF is essentially a female story, and it requires women writers to tell it.
"The truth," Julia Leigh writes early on in Avalanche, "was that many women had gone before me and found ways to lead a creative life and also be a mother. There were countless prams in countless hallways. It wasn't 'rocket science.' It wasn't either/or. There was enough space." Writing has been a "given" for Ms Leigh, a novelist and screenwriter of international standing. So it is surprising to hear her dismiss in a couple of lines - replete, what's more, with cliches - the honourable testimony of female literary history regarding what very much is the rocket science of combining artistic endeavour with family life.
And indeed, Avalanche is a harrowing and profoundly disturbing account of self-immolation in pursuit of an ideal, for what Ms Leigh has failed to recognise about "creative life" is that it arises in people of a single-mindedness and determination so strong it can destroy them.
At 38, Ms Leigh re-encounters and marries an old love from her student years: They have the good fortune to be impassioned lovers and soul mates, and the decision to have a child is quickly made. But Leigh then changes her mind; she wants to wait a year, "to be sure our relationship was truly solid.... One of my inner eels had slipped loose, an eel that took the guise of reasonable caution but which really was a small wriggling mistrust."
Ms Leigh's marriage reaches the breaking point in the most subtly brutal of ways: A film script she has written goes into production. A writer's dream, a mother's nightmare. She tells her husband she wants to stop trying to conceive while the film is being made. The production is a great success, but when the time comes to resume fertility treatment, her husband expresses serious doubts about her ability to commit herself to a family. The night before they are due at the clinic, they stay up late talking about it, "but I was bone-tired and soon begged off to sleep. When I woke up, Paul told me he was cancelling the cycle. He said that if we'd been talking about my work in the early hours of the morning, I would have managed to stay awake."
This harsh, brief scene represents the core tragedy of Avalanche. It's more than being forced to choose between what one doesn't have (a child) and what one does (a significant career opportunity); it's in fact a different version of that same "rocket science" Ms Leigh waved away so blithely at the beginning of her tale, the head-on collision of motherhood with work. Any working mother will have experienced this and know it isn't always or automatically one's maternal obligations that take priority.
It is after the sad breakdown of her marriage that Ms Leigh's story moves definitively into the shadowlands, for having parted from her husband, she decides to continue alone in her quest for a child. Another year and more failed procedures later, she asks her doctor whether she should stop trying. She suggests Ms Leigh give it one last try. "A few days later I wrote to ask the doctor a very specific question that I hadn't thought - or dared - to ask before: In the last year, what percentage of women my age at the clinic had taken home a baby using their own eggs? Her answer: 2.8 per cent for 44-year-olds."
Belle Boggs, in The Art of Waiting, gives a useful account of Virginia Woolf's frequent allusions in her diary to the pain of childlessness. "Let me watch the wave rise," Woolf wrote. "I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes. Failure. Failure. The wave rises." A few years later, triumphantly finishing The Waves, she wrote: "Children are nothing to this." "Few studies," Boggs writes, "have examined the effects of involuntary childlessness after medical treatment, but some psychologists have suggested that the myriad treatment options make it difficult for women to know when to stop.... The availability of choices is known to decrease our happiness."
Ms Boggs's wide survey of contemporary approaches to reproduction ("It is now possible for almost anyone with resources to become a parent") opens an ethical can of worms of some magnitude: The recipient of (successful) IVF treatment herself, Ms Boggs reports on such issues as international surrogacy and the unprincipled behaviour of some fertility clinics while trying to refrain from judging individuals for their choices. She asks a gay couple trying, so far without success, for a surrogate-egg-donor baby what they would tell their potential child about the way he or she came into the world. "We'll be very upfront with this kid," one of the fathers says. "We'll also say, you are our child, because that's what we believe." In this future-tense world, parenthood, that least perfectible of arts, is one long happy ending.
Ms Boggs's own father is more abrupt: "I once asked my father, 'Does having kids really squash all your dreams?' He thought for a minute. 'Yep,' he said. 'And it takes all your money too.' "
©2016 The New York Times News Service
A Love Story
Julia Leigh
W W Norton & Company
133 pages; $23.95
More From This Section
THE ART OF WAITING
On Fertility, Medicine and Motherhood
Belle Boggs
Graywolf Press
242 pages; $16
For several years I was a professor of creative writing at an English university, and a native habit of finding metaphors and similes in unlikely places occasionally led me to glimpse a strange half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Like the IVF industry, the creative writing business has many critics who deplore the notion that creativity can or should be taught and believe some central mystery of life is being violated therein. Part of the humiliation of being helped to bring forth what should emerge naturally (or, by implication, not at all) is the speed with which the most generous impulse - to create - begins to look like the most selfish.
The analogy between creative writing and fertility is not entirely facile: The story of IVF is essentially a female story, and it requires women writers to tell it.
"The truth," Julia Leigh writes early on in Avalanche, "was that many women had gone before me and found ways to lead a creative life and also be a mother. There were countless prams in countless hallways. It wasn't 'rocket science.' It wasn't either/or. There was enough space." Writing has been a "given" for Ms Leigh, a novelist and screenwriter of international standing. So it is surprising to hear her dismiss in a couple of lines - replete, what's more, with cliches - the honourable testimony of female literary history regarding what very much is the rocket science of combining artistic endeavour with family life.
And indeed, Avalanche is a harrowing and profoundly disturbing account of self-immolation in pursuit of an ideal, for what Ms Leigh has failed to recognise about "creative life" is that it arises in people of a single-mindedness and determination so strong it can destroy them.
At 38, Ms Leigh re-encounters and marries an old love from her student years: They have the good fortune to be impassioned lovers and soul mates, and the decision to have a child is quickly made. But Leigh then changes her mind; she wants to wait a year, "to be sure our relationship was truly solid.... One of my inner eels had slipped loose, an eel that took the guise of reasonable caution but which really was a small wriggling mistrust."
Ms Leigh's marriage reaches the breaking point in the most subtly brutal of ways: A film script she has written goes into production. A writer's dream, a mother's nightmare. She tells her husband she wants to stop trying to conceive while the film is being made. The production is a great success, but when the time comes to resume fertility treatment, her husband expresses serious doubts about her ability to commit herself to a family. The night before they are due at the clinic, they stay up late talking about it, "but I was bone-tired and soon begged off to sleep. When I woke up, Paul told me he was cancelling the cycle. He said that if we'd been talking about my work in the early hours of the morning, I would have managed to stay awake."
This harsh, brief scene represents the core tragedy of Avalanche. It's more than being forced to choose between what one doesn't have (a child) and what one does (a significant career opportunity); it's in fact a different version of that same "rocket science" Ms Leigh waved away so blithely at the beginning of her tale, the head-on collision of motherhood with work. Any working mother will have experienced this and know it isn't always or automatically one's maternal obligations that take priority.
It is after the sad breakdown of her marriage that Ms Leigh's story moves definitively into the shadowlands, for having parted from her husband, she decides to continue alone in her quest for a child. Another year and more failed procedures later, she asks her doctor whether she should stop trying. She suggests Ms Leigh give it one last try. "A few days later I wrote to ask the doctor a very specific question that I hadn't thought - or dared - to ask before: In the last year, what percentage of women my age at the clinic had taken home a baby using their own eggs? Her answer: 2.8 per cent for 44-year-olds."
Belle Boggs, in The Art of Waiting, gives a useful account of Virginia Woolf's frequent allusions in her diary to the pain of childlessness. "Let me watch the wave rise," Woolf wrote. "I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes. Failure. Failure. The wave rises." A few years later, triumphantly finishing The Waves, she wrote: "Children are nothing to this." "Few studies," Boggs writes, "have examined the effects of involuntary childlessness after medical treatment, but some psychologists have suggested that the myriad treatment options make it difficult for women to know when to stop.... The availability of choices is known to decrease our happiness."
Ms Boggs's wide survey of contemporary approaches to reproduction ("It is now possible for almost anyone with resources to become a parent") opens an ethical can of worms of some magnitude: The recipient of (successful) IVF treatment herself, Ms Boggs reports on such issues as international surrogacy and the unprincipled behaviour of some fertility clinics while trying to refrain from judging individuals for their choices. She asks a gay couple trying, so far without success, for a surrogate-egg-donor baby what they would tell their potential child about the way he or she came into the world. "We'll be very upfront with this kid," one of the fathers says. "We'll also say, you are our child, because that's what we believe." In this future-tense world, parenthood, that least perfectible of arts, is one long happy ending.
Ms Boggs's own father is more abrupt: "I once asked my father, 'Does having kids really squash all your dreams?' He thought for a minute. 'Yep,' he said. 'And it takes all your money too.' "
©2016 The New York Times News Service