Avalanche: A Love Story
By Julia Leigh
144 pages;
W. W. Norton & Company
When Julia Leigh walked into a fertility clinic, she had no way of
anticipating the harrowing journey that was about to begin. In spare,
scalpel-sharp prose, Leigh describes the intersection of primal desire and
wildly inexact science. Treatment after treatment failed and her marriage ended,
yet she continued the quest. One surreal conversation with her doctor about
whether to mix fresh with frozen eggs for insemination goes: "Is there a
difference between fresh and frozen? / There are no second-class children. / I
mean, is one more viable than the other? / Not much difference. / OK, I'll just do
frozen./Whatever you want." In other words, Leigh writes, "Pick your
own misadventure." As the losses (financial and emotional) mount, the
pursuit resembles gambling: Just one more try might yield the winning ticket. While
much has been written about infertility, Leigh's memoir stands out because of
her raw honesty and canny eye for the absurd (stopping at the grocery store to
buy eggs en route home from the clinic). Above all is the writer's courage to
let go: "Did I need to place my own child at the center of the world? Was
it enough that other beautiful children existed?" Perhaps the longest
journey for all of us is the one that, in her words, leads from I to we.
— Dawn Raffel
