Avalanche: A Love Story

by Julia Leigh

Overview

An intensely personal narrative of loss, hope, and longing for a child.

In this brave and lucid account, Julia Leigh broaches a challenging life event often left undiscussed: how the struggle to have a child can take an agonizing toll. Leigh’s experience at the vanguard of medical science is acutely rendered, physically and emotionally, transmitting what it feels like to so desperately wish for a child while knowing that the odds are stacked against you. From the daily shots she puts herself through at home, to hopes raised and dashed, and finally to the decision to stop treatment, Avalanche bears witness to Leigh’s raw desire, suffering, strength, and, in the end, transformation—a shift to a different kind of love. The reader looks behind the scenes of a clinic and discovers how things really work: reality is a far cry from the slick marketing of the billion-dollar infertility industry. As for so many women, Leigh’s treatment failed, but her ghost child lingers in memory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393292732
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/28/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	358 KB

About the Author

Julia Leigh is the author of The Hunter, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Disquiet, winner of the Encore Award (UK). She lives in Sydney, Australia.

Editorial Reviews

It is one of the first intelligent, personal accounts of the daily business of IVF, and as such will surely be a useful (albeit rather demoralising) resource for other women. She describes the grueling rounds of injections, blood tests and scans, and the bloating and physical depletion that result. However, it’s a book that rightly has wider ambitions, because these insistent, lengthy attempts to become pregnant raise more elemental questions about what it means to desire a child.

The Guardian

With searing intelligence and unflinching emotional clarity, Julia Leigh lays bare the exacting nature of desire. Avalanche is consummately ravishing.”

Tracy K. Smith

An astonishing and unfliching personal account of an IVF journey—fiece, touching and redemptive.

Jane Campion

Julia Leigh writes beautifully and honestly and has a rare gift for bringing the reading along as if a trusted friend. Her stories of love and loss, friendship and sorrow make Avalanche entirely relatable.”

Amy Richard

Leigh's a star and this account of IVF has all her brilliant luminosity.

Chloe Hooper

Deeply personal, insightful and raw—Julia Leigh's story of her desire for a baby is beautifully told. I didn't want to put this brave book down for a second.

Sofie Laguna

2016-04-30
A woman's struggle to conceive redefines her capacity to love.In a graphically detailed, at times solipsistic memoir, Australian novelist Leigh (Disquiet, 2008, etc.) chronicles her efforts, over several years, to conceive a child. In February 2008, the author and Paul, her husband-to-be, visited a fertility clinic to assess their chances for pregnancy. First on their agenda was reversing Paul's vasectomy, done years earlier after he had a son in a previous marriage. That procedure was only one among countless others: a test to determine Paul's sperm count; tests clearing them as carriers of illnesses such as hepatitis, HIV, rubella, and syphilis; tests to ascertain Leigh's hormone levels; and ultrasounds—all before Leigh began treatment to enhance ovulation. Meanwhile, the couple married, but soon the marriage fell apart. "He said I was relegating ‘Us' to my insistent desire for a child," she writes. "I couldn't bear his deliberate procrastinating, his brooding, his rages. The weight of his reproach." At first, he consented for her to use his sperm for in vitro fertilization; quickly, he changed his mind. "He didn't think I should be a mother; I was too selfish; I didn't know how to love," writes Leigh. Adamant about not using a sperm donor, Leigh pleaded with Paul, struggled to find another donor among men she knew, and finally found a friend who agreed. Years of blood tests, injections, and scans—recounted in detail—resulted in several implanted blastocysts, none of which developed. Over and over, Leigh collapsed in disappointment, only to begin again, submitting her body to continuous manipulation. Paul once had nicknamed her Pollyanna Juggernaut due to her undaunted optimism, but reality finally set in. No matter what the mother's age, she learned, assisted reproduction rarely results in pregnancy. "It's an industry predicated on failure," she realized, and she quit, vowing "to love widely and intensely." A brutally honest and sad testimony of a desperate desire for motherhood.

Kirkus Reviews