Brad's Reviews > Avalanche: A Love Story

I am a man. I am a father with three children. We had no trouble conceiving, and though we lost two babies to miscarriage, we've been fairly lucky when it comes to fertility and childbirth. Thus, my biases probably make my feelings about Avalanche: A Love Story unhelpful or tone deaf or irrelevant to many folks who don't share my experiences.

I'm going to share my biases anyway ('cause that's often what goodreads is for).

I don't believe there is a right to pregnancy or childbirth, nor do I support medical intervention to make pregnancy possible. My position does not come from religious conviction -- of which I have absolutely none -- but from my convictions about socio-economics and the nature of intervening when natural selection has made a choice we don't like.

I'm also not a fan of one-person shows. They are mostly self-indulgent, overrated crap from spoiled artists who reveal their inner selves in ways that vilify everyone who disagreed with them in their lives and rarely contain much in the way of self-reflection or personal responsibility. Privileged elites pretending to be victims or finding their identity in victimhood is not my idea of a stimulating evening of theatre.

To some extent, Avalanche: A Love Story falls into the confines of both these biases. It is, after all, about a privileged woman -- a white (Australian?), affluent screenwriter -- and her attempts to get pregnant in her late-thirties and early-forties. Even before she gets to the latter stages of fertility, pregnancy has been a long shot for her, and her own body proves to be as problematic as the man -- her ex-, then her husband, then her ex- again -- she hopes to share the experience with. Indeed, everyone around her is to blame for her situation to some extent or other, and even her mother, who tries to talk the narrator out of becoming pregnant because she thinks the narrator will be a terrible mother, is known only through her opposition to the narrator's journey. So the selfishness, the embrace of being the victim, the unmitigated privilege, and the single, whiny, self-indulgent voice made my time spent with Avalanche: A Love Story a challenge.

Yet somehow, with all these things working against my appreciation of the one-woman show, I found myself impressed by Avalanche: A Love Story. If I set aside all my problems with Avalanche: A Love Story, I am left with a narrative that did affect me emotionally. For all the narrator's faults, for all my feelings of opposition to her, Avalanche: A Love Story was able to take me to a place where it didn't matter what my biases were or are ... the narrator's truth was her truth and that is what mattered. No. I can't know what it was to be the narrator, to be a woman facing the pressures of motherhood slipping away from her in a society that still expects motherhood for all women, to understand the struggle to conceive -- possibly alone -- but Avalanche: A Love Story gave me a chance to empathize with someone who has experienced these things, and even if it wasn't terribly entertaining Avalanche: A Love Story was enriching.

That's good enough for me.