If a novella is a short novel, what’s a short memoir called: a memella? Sure. Let’s go with that.
I read Avalanche, a memella by Julia Leigh about her attempts to fall pregnant and have a child. It’s an odd piece of writing, veering unevenly from emotion to clinicality (I’m just going to be making up all the words today), sometimes with nary a word between the shifts. A good first third details her marriage, which falls apart, and whose relevance to the rest of the tale could be shrunk to a single sentence (After we divorced and my ex-husband no longer wanted me to use his frozen sperm …), which would eliminate the aren’t-we-so-in-love-more-than-you-could-ever-be bits that read like two seventeen year olds lecturing their elders about how incandescent their love is. Oh, how easy it is to be in love at the start. Then you divorce and your ex-husband rescinds his frozen sperm and what are you to do then? You try with donors and write a memella about the process.
Wanting a child hurts. You could tell that. Leigh’s yearning came through in the writing. Maybe it helped her to write it. It has the feeling of being personal, intimate, without artifice or performance for an audience. Leigh wrote it, she shared it, but it doesn’t seem like she wrote it for the purpose of sharing, like for click-bait or to emotionally blackmail readers. She wrote it and put it out to the world, like a parent has a child and puts her out to the world. Avalanche isn’t a child, but maybe it can be like the shadow of a child for Leigh. Not really shadow but like a hazy, dream image just before waking, from a daytime nap suspicion of a child. Those dreams where you find a secret door in your house and when you wake, for just a second, you think maybe there is a door there before realizing no, there isn’t. There’s no door. Like that, but for a child.
This memella uses the word childling more than once. I appreciate the use of this word probably more than I appreciate the memella. But I do appreciate giving literary space to women‘s issues. Flipping what’s often said: I read the book I want to (at least spiritually) write.
Avalanche by Julia Leigh went on sale October 6, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.