How well can you ever know someone? Fiona Lowe on secrecy, shattered trust and an ethical dilemma

How well we can know someone depends on one thing – and no, it’s not simply trust, argues Fiona Lowe as she examines the real impact of keeping secrets when it comes to relationships.

Life can change in a heartbeat – a cancer diagnosis, an ‘I don’t love you any more’ or the unexpected death of a loved one – and leave us reeling, grief-stricken. Then, on top of our pain, and when we are at our most vulnerable, there are many difficult and complicated decisions to consider.

We all have a picture in our mind of what we want our life to be, and a violent disruption is like falling off a mountain into a crevasse – nothing is stable and every step we take threatens to upend us. I remember the early days of my marriage and our five-year plans. Plan 1, career and travel, played out to perfection. Plan 2, start a family, hit a brick wall when I slammed into infertility. ‘Try IVF, you’ll be right’ was often said to me, as if IVF is a sure-fire solution. It is not.

‘How well do we ever know someone? Only as well as they choose to let us’ … Fiona Lowe poses the question in The Accident.

Reproductive technology offers us hope, but it comes with huge challenges – not only physical but also financial and ethical. We were faced with making decisions no one who conceives naturally ever needs to consider. We were given a form – if we stopped treatment, would we donate our frozen embryos to other couples? Just to clarify, these frozen embryos were our DNA; cells that may develop into our biological child. How would it feel to be childless but wonder if our child was being raised by someone else? At the time, we were assured that no child would be able to contact us so we would never know, but I had a gut feeling the law would change, and it did – children deserve the right to know who their biological parents are.

A couple of decades later, we have posthumous sperm retrieval, another ethical morass that requires a magistrate’s approval. It looks like a way to hold onto a dream and a loved one, but it is fraught with numerous dilemmas. Is it ethical to retrieve the sperm when the deceased person cannot give permission? Finding a doctor prepared to carry out the procedure can be difficult. Even more complicated are the laws surrounding the use of the retrieved sperm, which require a subsequent court application. Is a grieving family putting their loss ahead of the life of a child who will never know their father? As conception takes place months or years after the death of the biological father, in some instances overseas, it has thrown a shadow over the child’s rights to claim from their father’s estate. It is interesting to note that although numerous court applications are made for posthumous sperm retrieval, most frozen gametes are never used and only around five children are conceived this way in Australia each year.

When secrets emerge after years, even after death, the consequences can be devastating … The Accident is published on March 6.

Real world issues such as the “motherhood choice”, fertility and societal pressure feature in my new novel The Accident, as I explore the question of how well do you ever know someone? Only as well as they choose to let us. Yet, as someone who is relatively open about my life, I constantly forget this. Just recently I learned something significant about a person I have known for years. Why had she never disclosed this before? Why was it more of a shock to me to learn this after twenty years than it would have been in the early days of our friendship? I think it comes down to trust. We – especially women – assume that where trust exists there are no secrets and all will be shared.

When a secret or a story comes out after a long period of time it bruises trust, especially in romantic relationships. We inevitably make it about us as well as them. Questions swirl: what else aren’t they telling me? don’t they trust me? and we hear ourselves saying ‘I had a right to know.’ It can turn everything we ever believed about that person on its head and make us doubt everything we ever shared. It’s even worse when the secret comes out after they’ve died – not only are we dealing with grief, anger and bewilderment, we’re no longer able to ask them any questions. It leaves us floundering; utterly adrift. Who did we love? Was any of it real?

In The Accident, two couples are best friends and the men have known each other since kindergarten. They have their lives mapped out until an accident tears their lives apart. Although they all knew the person who died, they all knew a different version of them. Exactly who are they grieving?

‘Exactly who are they grieving?’ … Fiona Lowe.

The Accident by Fiona Lowe will be published by Harlequin on Wednesday.

Let us know if it’ll be on your reading list at The Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.

And check out our Book Of The Month, What Happened To Nina? by Dervla McTiernan. You can get it at Booktopia for 43 per cent off the RRP.

Originally published as How well can you ever know someone? Fiona Lowe on secrecy, shattered trust and an ethical dilemma