(courtesy Scribe Publications)
Reaching a crossroads point in your life is both liberating and hugely disquieting at the same time.
In a Hollywood movie, of course, this pivotal moment of existential decision-making would be rendered as an easily demarcated and simply resolved black-and-white inflection point, but real life rarely comes with the clean-cut bells and whistles of idealised storytelling and so we are often left in a contrary morasses of emotions and ideas that don’t necessarily make the way forward easy to grapple with.
Kylie Mirmohamadi’s brilliant novel, Diving, Falling, understands this intimately and with a quiet intensity, serving up a story of one woman’s arrival at this kind if pivot point and how she navigates with a sense of liberation but also a realisation that the path forward is far messier and less easily navigated that she might have hoped.
Leila Whittaker is a celebrated novelist who has, along with her now grown sons, Sebastian and Otis, has lived, and often suffered, in the considerable shadow case by the iconic fame of her artist husband, Ken Black.
A man of extravagant emotions and habitual larger-than-life moments, Ken Black is seen in near-mythical terms by the art world, media and the world at large, and Leila has, despite her own success, been seen purely in terms of who she is in relation to Ken.
‘Oh, Dad. You know you’ll just make a painting about this one day,’ Otis said, dismissively, as if he hadn’t crouched, terrified, in the corner of his room as his furious father sought him out, through all those open spaces of our home.
But then Ken dies after a terrible illness, and suddenly the world opens wide, or at least wider than it was because the effect of a man as society bestriding as Ken Black doesn’t dissipate overnight, if at all, and Leila is faced with all kinds of new possibilities.
But how do you navigate such an expanse of options when the husband you were married to defined your life so completely and absolutely, and you have spent your married life, while still in love with him, dealing with his endless extramarital affairs (including, rather awkwardly, with a close friend) and trying to keep the peace in a family riven by Ken’s black and unforgiving moods?
It’s not a question that Leila asks herself directly, but as the insightfully poetic narrative of Diving, Falling moves meditatively but emotionally powerfully forward, she has to come to terms with who she is when Ken Black is no longer everywhere.
He might still be an icon and his artwork may still command dizzying prices, but in her home and her private life, he is now removed, and Leila decides, slowly and then in a rush, that it’s high time she lived life on her terms and recovered her agency as a woman.
Not as a onetime wife of an artistic great or the mother of two doting, if fractious sons, or as part of the art world that knows her purely as the wife of Ken Black, but as Leila Whittaker, a talented writer, sexual being and a human being who is tired of living life on terms chosen for her and not left to her own autonomy to decide.
(courtesy Scribe Publications)
What unfolds then in Diving, Falling, which eschews big, dramatic moments for the simple but emotionally decisive twists and turns of real life, which rarely moves with adrenalised intensity and hardly ever ends up in cliffhanger tension, is the story of a woman beginning again on her terms.
She not entirely sure what these terms are, and there are missteps and errors of judgement aplenty but then isn’t that the stuff of being human?
It would be lovely if life ebbed and flowed, and reinvented itself in clean-cut ways that left the ;path forward undeniably clear and easily discerned, but it doesn’t and so Leila’s steps forward are that of anyone, regardless of status in society, sometimes excited, sometimes tentative, forwards, then backwards and then forward again.
Mirmohamadi writes with a thoughtful and assured ease, imbuing Diving, Falling with rich, raw and honest humanity, its focus keenly on how woman are held to such different standards to men, and how getting around these, if passage can indeed be found, is fraught and challenging, even when there is so much promise in an undeveloped future.
What really entrances you about Diving, Falling is that it doesn’t pretend any of this is easy.
Every potentially exciting step forward for Leila is complicated and messy and while her life doesn’t begin to bloom and grow on her terms and she comes alive in a some surprisingly wonderful ways, the novel doesn’t pretend it’s all wine and roses and endless self-fulfillment.
And that is how I can say, with confidence, that there are women walking around this earth with hearts that are broken, though they beat on.
Which is refreshing because while the thrill of new beginnings is very much alive and well in Diving, Falling, resonating with anyone who has had to start all over again in the midst of grief, uncertainty and loss, we all know that you can’t just pack away the past and how it’s shaped you and turn around march unaffected off into the undiscovered country of the future.
With writing that is beautifully, meditatively rendered, Mirmohamadi keeps the tension between possibility and grim reality right where it should be, keeping things grounded and honest while acknowledging how freeing it can be for the human heart to be let off a long-worn leash to do its own thing.
Reading as Leila comes alive, and her sons and friends also make their own journey to a place where Ken Black’s massive shadow does not loom large, is a thing of honest, soothing joy because it grants you permission to recover your agency and find your own path while freeing you from the ponderous and imprisoning idea that it will all be smooth sailing.
Far from harshing any kind of reinvention buzz or raining on any kind of new life parade, what Diving, Falling does so brilliantly well is open the curtain to the future in the story of Leila who comes alive to what might lie ahead, and who, while she’s caught in the web of existing complications, finds herself rediscovering her passions and joys as a woman and recovering long-dormant agency which transcends the past and allows her to finally life on terms that are hers and hers alone.