At the age of 37, the Australian novelist Julia Leigh reconnected with Paul, a boyfriend from her undergraduate days. A common modern fairytale ensued, and they quickly started talking about marriage and children. Soon they went to an IVF clinic, where they were told that her chances of becoming pregnant were good and that it was possible to reverse Paul’s vasectomy. Her second novel came out; her life seemed to be falling into place.

But neither marriage nor procreation turned out to be as simple as Leigh – known by Paul as “Pollyanna Juggernaut” because of her insistent optimism – had hoped. Though at first they found procreative sex romantic, they quickly came to resent being woken by an alarm at 6am in time for a swift ejaculation before work. Though Leigh initially assumed there would be no conflict between motherhood and her creative life, when her screenplay was made into a film she suggested to Paul that they should stop “trying” for six months. This seems to have been a turning point. He saw her as choosing selfishly to put her career ahead of their life together, and denying love both to him and to their unborn child. Shortly after the filming was finished he filed for a halfway legal separation.

They reconciled enough to return to the IVF clinic and prepare for treatment (he had sperm but was still not emitting it), but Paul kept changing his mind and eventually asked for a divorce. Heartbroken, Leigh looked for a sperm donor, determined to have a child on her own. By the time she found one she was 42, and her chances of success were low. Avalanche is an account of her six rounds of IVF.

It is one of the first intelligent, personal accounts of the daily business of IVF, and as such will surely be a useful (albeit rather demoralising) resource for other women. She describes the gruelling rounds of injections, blood tests and scans, and the bloating and physical depletion that result. However, it’s a book that rightly has wider ambitions, because these insistent, lengthy attempts to become pregnant raise more elemental questions about what it means to desire a child.

Implicit is the question of the ethics of expensive IVF treatments, offered to desperate women who then become addicted to the promise of success. Leigh suggests that the clinics misrepresent the statistics, and should be more open about the fact that only 20% of cycles result in a healthy baby. It’s good that she doesn’t make this point repeatedly, because I think it’s too complex an issue on which to take a political stand. If the clinics focus on the slim possibility of success, then so do the women themselves.

Threading through the book is the idea of Leigh’s supposed selfishness, and whether this would make her a bad mother. After initially agreeing to give her his sperm, even after their divorce, Paul changed his mind, claiming that her excessive dedication to her work would be damaging for her child: “You had no commitment to my happiness,” he told her. Was it selfish of her to give her work equal priority to her childbearing? Even if she was acting selfishly towards Paul, surely she was not being selfish in the more general sense: children are the product of an equally selfish desire to procreate. And love for a child, like any other kind of love, has to allow space for oneself. Paul seems to have felt threatened not simply by the time Leigh spent away from him but by the sense that she engaged in her creative projects with all her being. But surely this ability to immerse yourself in an imagined world is usefully compatible with motherhood. It seems important to insist that motherhood doesn’t need to be as selfless as some people, perhaps indoctrinated by the culture of 21st-century parenting, appear to believe.

But there’s another kind of selfishness that I found more problematic here, and that’s a selfishness of authorial voice. Where other writers of personal memoirs of this kind – Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson – have opened outwards, allowing themselves to become representative, incorporating all the people they have been reading and thinking about in their work, Leigh’s book lacks a frame of wider reference. As a reader, I found it claustrophobic to inhabit her rather solipsistic world.

Generally, I hate the accusation of self-obsession, with its implication that it is self-indulgent to analyse your own psyche. Thinking about feelings matters, and we are our own best raw material. Nonetheless, I found myself wondering if Leigh was self-obsessed. Although we know she has creative projects on the go, we don’t hear about them in any detail, and I think that it would have helped to go beyond her sexual and reproductive life and learn more about what she was writing or thinking at this time.

The moments of humour help. The cure for sexual frustration? “Finger the downy peaches in the fruit store; call out ‘Coming!’ to the man who brings home-delivery to the door.” And so do the moments of poetic wisdom. “I’m an expert at make-believe. Our child was not unreal to me … A desired and nurtured inner presence. Not real but a singular presence in which I had radical faith.” What kind of grief is admissible for an imagined child? Is the loss of an embryo a form of death or not?

Whatever categories we use for this loss, its emotional toll can be high. Leigh’s writing is at its most powerful when she shows herself abandoning her Pollyanna optimism and learning what it means to fully inhabit the feeling of failure. Just after she decided to stop trying, in the summer of 2014, she watched Germany beat Argentina in the World Cup final. At the end, the Argentinian player Lionel Messi was openly downcast and angry when he went up to collect a trophy for best player of the tournament, and Leigh admired his public refusal to deny the costs of disappointment. “Something deeply meaningful to him had been lost. He – and his team – were truly defeated.”

• Lara Feigel’s The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich is published by Bloomsbury. Avalanche is published by Faber. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.