What do you do when you want to be a mother and you are not in a heterosexual relationship? For writer Alexandra Collier, the question was mired by years of uncertainty and disappointments. She tried dating, but the results were unsatisfying. All she wanted was the ordinary desires many of us harbour – a family, with two loving parents and a happy child.
In the midst of a harrowing breakup, Collier returned to her hometown of Melbourne after spending more than a decade in New York City. She left her long-term partner because he told her he wasn’t ready for a child. As a woman in her late thirties, Collier’s options were limited, but she was determined to play her cards as best she could.
In her debut book, “Inconceivable” (which comes out today), Collier takes us through her journey of finding love, losing love, and ultimately, getting pregnant upon her first attempt using a sperm donor. Today, we sit down with the author of this extraordinary book and ask her about the process of diving into this awe-inspiring story.
The story you tell about your logistical path toward becoming a mother who used a sperm donor is still relatively recent. And yet you write in the book about those days with the tone of someone who has had years to reflect on it. How did you retain so much of what you felt during those times, speak with such wise hindsight, yet still make the writing so immediate and vivid?
I obsessively keep journals (I brought boxes of them home from New York at ridiculous expense). They’re fragmented and not really diary-like but I was able to create more vivid detail by using the atmosphere of those journals. Also, in the lead up and during and after my pregnancy, I was writing everything down with a kind of mad compulsion, as I had the sense that this would be an important story.
You encountered many judgemental people during your journey towards parenthood without a romantic ‘partner’. How did you overcome these judgments? How did you stay strong in the face of these critical opinions?
My desire to have a baby was so fierce – it was like being possessed, I think that’s what kept driving me forward. I think because outwardly I’ve always been a fairly dutiful and diligent eldest daughter, underneath I have a simmering, rebellious, ‘fuck you’ spirit. So I stubbornly pushed back against any judgement I encountered about solo motherhood.
Also, the women I met along this path were role models for me – my dear friend Sam, another solo parent who I write about in the book and all the women I connected to online and through a support group. It really illustrated that cliché to me that when you see it outside of yourself (an example of your future-self), you can be it.
Why, in 2023, is society still so biased against single people? Why are women still seen as ‘less than’ when they don’t have a romantic partner? And what can we do to change these perceptions?
Romance is a kind of mythology that we live by – it’s almost our contemporary religion. It’s very powerful still, this romantic notion that we’ll find one singular uber-human who will be our “person” – preferably via some kind of movie-style meet-cute where we lock eyes through a fish tank or bump into them on the street while carrying our shopping.
I think part of the reason coupledom is still mandatory is that it’s important for the patriarchy to uphold the hetero family structure (where women basically do most of the child-rearing and emotional labour for men) and single women are threatening to that structure. The married ideal is so strong that it’s arguably better to find anyone at all than be alone and single.
How can we change that? The only way I know how to do things is through words and writing. So I’d say by presenting more stories of single women who aren’t slumped at their kitchen benches pouring their chardonnay up to the rim of the glass and looking miserable (not that there’s anything wrong with a large glass of wine).
Are you still in touch with the women you met in the Facebook solo parent group? I understand the group is continuing to expand throughout Australia? Are the women there still a source of support?
The women in my solo mum group on Facebook and the women I met through VARTA’s now-defunct support group are still at the end of the line all the time. We text, we go away on group holidays, we talk on the phone. They are a constant source of support and good humour and are true allies in this unique experience.
Your dreams of NYC was something I related to. Where do you think your love of NYC, and this belief that you had to be in that city to ‘make it’ come from, do you think? What do you think about that dream now?
New York (and London) are the ultimate destinations for Australians trying to make it – especially as artists – perhaps it’s because we still suffer from cultural cringe and laud art from overseas as being more important than our own. I was intoxicated by New York in my early 20s and I moved there with a naïve and delusional optimism that it would be easy to start a theatre career there. I made the mistake that so many expats make – I thought I would have the same magical experience as I did on a brief, previous holiday-like visit.
In reality, it was very gruelling – those were some of the toughest years of my life and I was often incredibly homesick. This is encapsulated by my favourite article from the Onion titled ‘8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live’. Now I look back at New York with a kind of detached fondness. If I did my 20s again, I wouldn’t punish myself by being so relentlessly ambitious and thinking I could somehow conquer New York.
For each achievement I had in New York, the bar just raised a notch. It’s a relentless place. And my ambition started to eat away at me. I left there heartbroken and ready to return home so I don’t miss the city at all but I do miss the friends I made – the extraordinary intelligence and talent of those people I connected with, their drive, their enthusiasm for culture and creativity. I miss that. But I never want to live in that rat-infested city. Ever. Again.
Other than books and theatre, what other forms of art inspire you? What have you been consuming (books, movies, podcasts etc) recently that’s spoken to you?
It’s an endless list (I read voraciously and have read a million memoirs these last few years as I’ve written my own) but here’s a few that spring to mind (not all about motherhood)…
- My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud is an incredible book about motherhood that is visceral and punches you in the gut in the way she describes mother-love
- Small Animals by Kim Brooks – she writes about leaving her child in the car for a few minutes, then getting prosecuted for it and how we live in an age of anxiety and fear around parenting like never before.
- Overwhelmed and Dying and Overwhelmed and Living – both podcasts by Judith Lucy that address climate change and also manage to be funny
- Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness by Catherine Cho – a very raw account of a descent into a post-partum madness that sent Cho to a psych ward, it’s as though she wrote this from inside the belly of the beast.
Alexandra Collier’s debut book, Inconceivable, is out now through Hachette.