MEMOIR
Childless: a story of freedom and longing
Sian Prior
Text Publishing ($34.99)

Life is made up of countless transient moments, but in any given moment, the course of our lives can change forever or leave scars that take a lifetime to make peace with.

A father plunges into the surf to save two people from drowning, only to die in the waves as his wife and three small children watch from shore. A radio presenter suffers a miscarriage during a live broadcast, but stoically keeps the show on air as her private crisis unfolds. A famous, ageing musician tells his partner of 10 years that their relationship is over because he wants to see “more women”.

Sian Prior is the child, presenter and partner in each of these wrenching scenes in her second memoir, Childless, which explores her lifelong ache and tenacious effort to have her own child.
This is a generously intimate and insightful book. Prior is porous and vulnerable with her story as she describes the rollercoaster of relationships, miscarriages, IVF cycles, love, lust, loss and loneliness that comes with trying to conceive over many years.

This is also a book alive with questions and a subterranean depth as Prior takes us backwards and forwards across the timeline of her life and interrogates her intense pull toward motherhood. Tediously, society still struggles to categorise women who aren’t mothers. When child-free women are asked about children, all their other meaningful accomplishments or experiences are rudely rendered invisible or insignificant. They are pitied for missing out, decried as selfish or labelled as outliers or oddballs.

Many women actively choose not to have children, others might have had them were they not diverted by circumstances, all-consuming careers, truncated relationships, trauma histories or fertility difficulties. For Prior, the desire has always been clear and all-consuming. “I always assumed it was a matter of when, not if, I would have a child”, she writes.

When her musician partner “Tom” writes a pop song about her childless angst, firm in his own decision not to reverse his vasectomy, she is shocked at the invasion of her privacy. But the memoirist’s pen is not unlike a songwriter’s scratchings — forensic and x-ray-like. She similarly mines her relationships with Tom, Jack, and other ex-partners for insights, and this is her telling of their stories, or more particularly, her story with them.

Tom won’t censor his song, saying “I have to be able to write what I want to write … besides, don’t you want to be immortalised?” It’s a question that weighs on her mind as she returns to her childhood, the enduring love of her mother in the face of dreadful loss and the father she never knew but has never stopped imagining.