Born Sleeping by H.C. Gildfind
“Perhaps, you think, we are all born sleeping. Perhaps these things that happen to us - and to the people closest to us - are the only things that can ever, truly, wake us up.”
Born Sleeping (2021) is H.C. Gildfind’s latest novella, and the winner of the 2020 Miami University Press Novella Prize. As anyone who has read her previous short stories or novellas might expect, it covers a lot of ground without once compromising exceptional writing quality. I read and reviewed Gildfind’s short story collection The Worry Front (2018) last year, and if there’s one thing you should know about her work, it’s that she never shies away from exploring the cruelty of our world. Gildfind takes her stories to dark places, but it never feels graphic or exploitative. Wrapped up in all the darkness is always a strong connection back to human emotion, and the writing feels intensely aware of the troubling subject matter it is tackling.
Knowing this definitely helped me feel prepared for what Born Sleeping offers. The title itself is a telling clue for the tale within, and we are thrown in the deep end from the opening paragraphs. Our narrator, a writer, recounts to us in real-time learning the news that her pregnant sister-in-law, married to her husband's brother, has experienced a stillbirth. A sense of voyeurism permeates the rest of the story as we follow the narrator’s thoughts through the trauma of the experience.
“It died, he says, absently pushing the food around the pan with a spoon. It died this morning. Instantly, you glimpse what he has already seen: how a single moment in time can turn a baby - who has been He for months and months - into an It.”
Through a series of recollections, the narrator recalls the fractured relationship she has had with her sister-in-law, Mel; her smugness at delivering the first-born grandchild and the power this has given her over our childless narrator:
“Mel was feeling powerful - and she was revelling in that feeling... She knew the beauty and potency of her young, pregnant body. And she fully believed, too, that her fertility and glamourous image had more power than any of your carefully crafted sentences ever would.”
Their relationship’s rigidity and competitiveness lessens the impact of the emotional event for the narrator - or so she initially believes. Intuitively, we know how we are supposed to respond, behave and react to these situations, but Gildfind’s narrator takes us deep below this, to the complex and nuanced ways we become entangled with other people and how, even in the face of horrific events, these nuances creep up on us:
“Your mind roves over all that has happened in the past hour, your thoughts moving faster and faster, propelled by one clear - undeniable - feeling: excitement. This is a drama. This is an unusual and extreme event. This is a tragedy.”
Our narrator pulls outwards from the shock of the event and remembers her grandmother experiencing a stillbirth in Scotland, the ways this was handled compared with the publicity-driven social media narratives Mel lives on. How the event haunted her grandmother in her older years, and how her pain became increasingly exposed after years of being forced to cover it up.
Despite how much our narrator wants to experience the excitement of the event, she recoils from the reality and the details of the process when they visit Mel, along with other family members, in the hospital. Photos of the stillborn baby are shared, with the narrator and her husband spending the ‘right’ amount of time looking at each one closely, as Mel begins to tell her story:
“On she goes, methodically, calmly, casually. You steady yourself. You breathe deeply. You feel the lump in your throat - that stray tooth of memory - calcifying each new layer of detail onto the others. You swallow. Try not to retch.”
Gildfind’s prose is lyrical and sparse. She manages to build expansive cultural commentary into a very personal and individual event. Trauma imbues this story and not just the trauma of the baby’s death. Loss and the ricochets of grief are multi-faceted, and Gildfind explores this with authenticity.
While this is not an easy story to read, Gildfind shines an illuminating light on an all too common experience for many women, one rarely spoken about and one that needs the care of writing like this to bring it back into the scope of healing. There is much power in these words.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
