Lost love leads to a valuable lesson learned

“I can’t do it.”

Not what a bride wants to hear from her groom, especially when the wedding date has been set, the dress paid for and the church booked.           

Nikki Gemmell was crushed when her writer fiancee jilted her, but 30 years on she says these four words saved her.

In her new memoir Dissolve, the best-selling Australian author reflects on how creative women can lose their own identities in romantic relationships.

At the time, being dumped was a shattering experience, Gemmell tells Jesse Mulligan.

“It was in my mid-20s, I felt like a failure, I felt completely rejected, I loathed myself, I blamed myself, I thought why aren't I lovable? No one will ever love me again. I can't do this love thing. I can't do it properly. I was just desolate for years afterwards.”

It was her father who helped her pick up the pieces.

“I can remember him saying 'welcome to the very exclusive club called ‘heartbreak club’ that no one wants to join. But when you're in it, all those members know exactly what you've gone through'.

“He said 'this will take you three years to get over' because he was divorced at that stage, and he'd gone through heartbreak, too.”

Gemmell’s father said after three years she would walk away from the experience a different person.

“He was right, it did take three years to get over. But it's taken me almost three decades to be able to write about it and process it.”

The book's title - Dissolve - is Gemmell's description of both becoming lost in that relationship but also how many aspects of her personality were subsumed at that time.

“It was something I'd never felt before, the cliché of the thunderbolt of love that changes everything. But it changed me and I didn't really realise until years, decades, later, how I was dissolving my own character and my own personality within that relationship.”

It was a passionate and intense relationship that lasted for 18 months, she says.

“He was a good man, he was a great man. He was just the wrong man for me.

“But at that time, I was desperate to hold on to him. And I didn't realise how much I was changing myself to try and fit into the picture of what I thought he wanted from a woman and a partner.”

At the time, a close friend of Gemmell's told her she was “disappearing”.

“I looked back and that was true. I was losing a lot of weight. I was changing my personality. I was pretending to like Bob Dylan, even though I don't really like Bob Dylan at all.”

It was Gemmell's first serious relationship.

“This man was offering me the holy grail of love and marriage and the wedding and all that kind of thing.

“I wanted to keep up with the schoolmates, who were all pairing off. starting to have kids at that age, all the rest of it. I was desperate to conform.”

Dissolve, as well as being a memoir, is a reflection on the life of creative women.

“At that time, during the period of [writing] Dissolve, I was wanting to be a writer and this man I fell deeply in love with was a writer.

“So, it was basically two people in the same field. So, I was very interested in many, many different creative relationships involving a very artistic woman, and how her art, her creativity was changed or dissolved, when it came up hard against a creative male and his ego.”

Gemmell explores this pattern in the romantic relationships of poet Sylvia Plath, sculptor Camille Claudel, painter Dora Maar and writers including Janet Frame and Katherine Mansfield.

“I've gone back to all these different female, wonderfully creative lionesses, to see how they coped or didn't, in relationships with male partners, and often it was creative partners. Often it was very fiery, it was destructive.

“It was a problem for their own creativity, which is what I found for myself during this time, too. I didn't write at all really when I was with this writer because his world was so all-consuming and dominating.”

Gemmell sees Dissolve as a kind of warning for younger women, written by a “grumpy, pre-menopausal" woman.

“[The book] examines things like consent and sexual power and control within a relationship, lots of different things like that.

“So, I just felt like the time was right in this Me Too era. It just felt like a good time to look back at a seminal moment of a time in my life that changed me.”

Gemmell says she started to lose self-confidence as she entered adulthood.

“Edith Wharton, she wrote about this 110 years ago, she talked about the ‘curtain of niceness’ that falls over young women.

“And it's that moment when we reach puberty, and for some reason, studies bear this out, we lose our confidence. And in terms of Wharton’s curtain of niceness, it's that whole thing of we become meeker, quieter, we learn that we have to be nice to get ahead in life, to get a man, all those kinds of things, we have to be quiet.”

Now in her mid-50s, Gemmell “rages” against such strictures.

“I think it's the world around us that imposes this lack of confidence upon us because it doesn't let us be our true authentic selves as women.

“I look at the young girls around me, girls of 7, 8 and 9, and they’re sparky, and they’re stubborn and their outspoken and they’re strong and it's fabulous.

"For so many of us women, not all of us, but so many of us, myself included, something was eroded within me as I entered adulthood, and it kind of created this huge conflict within me of I know who I want to be, and I know who I am, but I'm not allowed to be that, I have to change, I have to quieten, I have to stop questioning, I have to quieten my voice, I have to learn not to be at the centre of a situation, I have to step away and let men take the limelight.”

Gemmell subsequently did marry and have a family, she says, with a "secure, beta male".

"In the end, I found a good man, who I asked to marry myself. And we got married when we were 32. I would describe him as a secure beta, he's very secure, very confident within himself and who he is and because he's so comfortable and so confident within himself, he's happy to just let me go and let me be who I want to be.

"I think there's probably nothing more dangerous for a female than an insecure alpha."

Gemmell says she would have never emerged as a creative woman if she'd married the writer she was engaged to in her 20s.

“The flame, that tiny, little burning flame of creativity and ambition would have been extinguished. I would have become the writer's muse, the writer’s wife.

“And that would have been my life and I would have been very, very unhappy within it, I'm sure. So, in a way, he broke me, but he also handed me the greatest gift of my life by handing me my creativity.”