The Leveret: Anna Goldreich on Grief, Miscarriage and Queerness in her Debut Novel

So many people have experienced miscarriage, and yet it’s hardly spoken about. Even less so in the context of queer relationships, where the journey to pregnancy is often so much more complex. It’s a difficult thing to talk about, it’s painful, it’s unbearable to think about, and yet, so many people have to bear it. 

I didn’t realise quite how common miscarriage was until I started working on my debut novel, The Leveret. People would ask me, family, friends, friends of friends, so, what is your book about? And I would tell them, miscarriage, grief, how people cope. And too many people would say, oh, I have struggled with fertility, I have lost, I have suffered, I have had to come to terms with it. 

And then so many people would say, no, I have never seen this experience represented in books or music or film, and yes, it felt so lonely, felt like I was the only one.

We allow people to grieve babies who have been carried to term and passed away. Of course. But the same permission, it seems, is not given to people who have suffered miscarriage. Parents are told, it happens, don’t let it put you off, try again, as though they haven’t had some piece of themselves torn away, as though this isn’t a huge loss. The baby lost to miscarriage had just as much future as any other baby. The parents had ideas about the kind of person this baby would be, the kind of people they would become with this baby. They were full of future and that future is gone. 

Now what? They were parents for a moment, weren’t they? Are they still? What are they now?

How strange, how lonely. Even when you’re in a couple, if you are the person who has carried and lost the child, you have to grieve this bodily thing alone. Someone else is grieving too, but you are the one who has physically felt the presence and the absence, has felt that clenching in the pit of you, has seen the blood in your knickers.  And if you are the person who has watched the person you love hold and lose this potential child, how do you cope? How do you attend to your own sadness, while supporting the other person in theirs?

My debut novel, The Leveret, follows queer couple, Clare and Phoebe, as they navigate their grief in the wake of a late miscarriage. Clare, who carried the baby, retreats inwards. The space opened inside her is filled with loss. She tries to find another way to fill it. To nurture something, this is what she needs. She finds an orphaned baby hare and pours herself into raising it. And Phoebe, ever practical,

occupies herself with work. To confront their reality is too painful, impossible to cope with. Phoebe misses Clare and misses the people they used to be. With Clare drifting further and further away, Phoebe desperately tries to cling on to the woman

she fell in love with.

Clare and Phoebe’s story is one amongst many. Every person who has suffered a miscarriage or lost a baby, has a unique and personal story which can only be told by them. My aim in writing this book is to bring this singular and solitary pain to light and to hopefully make even one person feel less alone.