Category: Mothers

The bedside bookstack – October 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Solider Sailor by Claire Kilroy, faber, 2023

Soldier speaks this story Sailor, to her baby boy. She tells him of his birth and the early months of his life. She advises him on what to be and not to be in this world and she apologises for the backdrop to his first years when she and Sailor’s father fought and she nearly let all of them go.

She speaks like a madwoman telling all our truths and she is mad with the lack of sleep, the exhaustion, the relentless repetition of those early days of motherhood and the sudden gender division of labour. This is such a sucker punch of read – visceral and all-consuming. You feel like you’re drowning with her, so maybe one for when you’re out of the trenches and sleeping through the night again yourself.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Random House, 2024

Six astronauts orbit around the earth over a 24 hour period. That’s it. That’s what happens in this book but it is beautiful and poetic and slowed me down until it felt more like a meditation than a narrative.

As they go about their daily tasks, they think about their lives and their loved ones. They look down on the world as life down there wakes up and goes to sleep again. They record the growing fury of a typhoon for meteorological services back on earth and they wonder about the vast space that opens up when they look in any direction other than earth. Grand in content and contained in style, this is like the space version of a Claire Keegan book. Just gorgeous.

Sky Song by C. A. Wright, Pantera Press, 2024

CA Wright was our October Books at the Bowlo guest. It’s always a treat to read a book and then get more insight into it from both a craft and content angle.

Oriane is the Skylark. She sings the sun and a new day into being every morning. To many she is just a myth. Her father has kept her hidden in safety but as she grows so does her curiosity about what is out there beyond their isolated home in the woods. There is another myth. This one is about the Nightingale who sings forth the darkness each evening and if Oriane is real, perhaps the Nightingale is too.

This is based on a Hans Christian Anderson story. I don’t know the original but I’m always curious about what was kept and shed in the rewrite.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maas, Writer’s Digest Books, 2016

Boom!! That was my head exploding into smithereens while reading this book. Donald Maas is New York literary agent and after reading thousands of manuscripts he started to wonder why some brilliantly plotted and/or written books still didn’t make much of an impression on him.

His analysis is that it is the emotional impact and connection with a book which makes it stand out from others. He lays out different methods for achieving emotional engagement and includes excerpts and exercises with each. This book is a brilliant mix of theory and practice and is now in my Top 3 Writing Books. Yep. That’s saying something.

Oh, what are the other 2 you ask. George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I just keep going back to them again and again and I can see how this will be the same.

The Writer’s Library by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager, Harper One, 2020

I know, no one needs more to add to their book list but….I’m a big fan of reading about writers and certainly very happy to take their book recommendations. Each chapter is dedicated to a writer and set out in Q and A style from their early reading to reading which made them want to write, reading which influenced certain works of theirs and what they’re reading now. And instead of having to take notes and add books as you’re reading it, there’s a list at the end of each chapter for all the books which were mentioned!

Just as a warning, it’s an American book, thus US writers only which could be limiting for some readers but I picked and chose a bit and loved that my current fiction fan-girl recipient, Jennifer Egan, was featured.

Wall by Jen Craig, Puncher & Wattman, 2023

An artist returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house after his death. She has plans to turn it into an installation but the reality of a hoarder’s house and the history it holds for her make it a much more complicated task. I’ve only just started this. The stream-of-consciousness prose is densely packed, almost like the narrator’s thoughts are mirroring the clutter she stands in. She jumps from art theory to family memories to her current situation in the same way that she notices and moves on from the objects around her. Not a tired bedtime read, methinks.

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The bedside bookstack – April 2024

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this month.

Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson, Allen & Unwin 2023

Susan Johnson and her mother pack up their lives in Brisbane and move to the Greek Island of Kythera together.

This book is alive with the sensual delights of life – eating, drinking, swimming, dancing and romancing. It’s also a contemplation of self, family dynamics, ‘home’, the writer’s life, how to live a good life and of course the Greek Island Kythera which is as much as main character as Susan and her mother Barbara.

The island with its seasons, history, culture and unique landscape is so vividly conjured and all the while there is the evolution and examination of her relationship with her mother. How can we be adult parents and still find ourselves almost back at the beginning with our own parents? There is so much love in this relationship but she’s honest enough to write in the frustrations and distances which also shape their time together on Kythera. Such a beautiful  and rich book. I’m still thinking about it.

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

This book runs as two parallel narratives of Lexie moving through Soho and the London art world in the 60s and Elina and Ted both finding their way in the aftermath of the traumatic birth of their first child. The impatient reader in me wanted to join the dots sooner than the story allowed.

Maggie has written plenty of dual and multi narrative novels but I think my impatience was that each narrative was smaller than hers usually are, couples with a few people clustered around them. I think what I really missed were her vast and fascinating family dynamics. For me, that’s when she is the absolute master, writing about families.

All the Unloved by Susan McCreery, Spineless Wonders, 2023

Thank you, Spineless Wonders for championing short form fiction! I’m a huge fan of short stories and novellas but I know that they’re a notoriously hard sell for publishers and most of the big houses avoid them. Thus, go you good thing Susan, to have a stand-alone novella out in the world!

Jade lives in block of flats with her mum in 90s Bondi. She’s awkward and adolescent and doesn’t need everything else around her to be changing too but it is. Her step-dad moves out. So does one of the women from the couple upstairs. An interesting but introverted tenant moves in downstairs and then there’s her mum’s client Rebecca, who everyone seems just a little in love with.

Darling by India Knight, Penguin 2022

This was soooo much fun!! Nancy Mitford fans, not sure how purist you are but if you’re open to a modern retelling of The Pursuit of Love, then pick this one up. Everyone else, you’re fine because you won’t be holding it up against anything else.

Darling is about lovely eccentric rich people in the English countryside and eventually London and beyond as well as truly awful rich people but everyone, even the cringey cameos are just so vivid and enjoyable. The Radlet family especially move on at a merry clip with their own vernacular and idiosyncrasies and it’s just such a pleasure to join them.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Vintage Classic, 2000

It’s tricky for a book that comes to you loaded with its own success and place in the canon. I thought it was time I read some Vonnegut and I have now. I didn’t love and didn’t hate it. He’s definitely doing some interesting things with non-linear plotlines, which would’ve been even more original at the time of its original publication in 1969.

The narrator, who says he’s the author, wants to write about the fire-bombing of Dresden during the second world war but he can’t seem to get into it for himself. So, he writes about Billy Pilgrim instead who is being held as a POW but is simultaneously flashing forwards and backwards in life to another planet as well as old age. I know, I know, it’s metaphor and satire and a very specific comment on the atrocity of war. Just not what I was expecting it  to be.

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent, Sandycove, 2023

This thriller comes with plenty of accolades and No 1 spots. It’s pacy, original and a good read. Sally Diamond has problems with empathy and connection. Since her mum died, she’s lived an isolated life with her father on the outskirts of a small Irish town. He tells her that when he dies, she should put him out with the rubbish, so when he dies, that’s what she does. The police get involved and it hits the headlines because Sally Diamond is not who she thinks she is.

For me, it was a reminder why I’m not a big thriller reader. As good as a story may be, in the brief time I have available to read, I don’t think I love hanging out with the darkness and crimes that you need for the tension and twists to work.

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The bedside bookstack – October 2023

What’s sitting on the bedside bookstack this October.

The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright, Jonathan Cape, 2023

Anyone who’s been reading a few recent Bookstacks will notice I’m partial to Irish literature. My grandparents were Irish immigrants. Even transplanted to Australia, there’s a lot that is familiar in the cultural legacy; the Catholicism, the big families, the lack of money and knowing your place in the pecking order. So, no surprises that I’m an Anne Enright fan. Loved the Gathering, the Green Road and Actress and thus headed straight to this one when I saw she had something new out.

Carmel McDaragh’s father is a well-known fictional Irish poet, Phil McDraagh. She grows up in reaction to his dramatic leaving of the family. Her daughter Nell grows up in reaction to Carmel and so a generational pattern is set. The push and pull of love, loyalty and disappointment plays out in a destructive loop.

I wanted to love, love, love this one but it came in at like. There was something that always had me a bit wrong-footed. I don’t know if it was a lack of balance in the narration or frustration with the characters. It just never seemed to settle for me. It’s Anne Enright though, so the writing is still a joy.

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff, Allen & Unwin, 2023

This absolute page-turner of a book has me wondering how exactly she got me to laugh so much while at the same time covering domestic violence, sexual abuse, caste discrimination and the general all-round subjugation of women.

Geeta is part of a microloan group in rural India. Everyone in her village, and the group, think she murdered her husband because he disappeared one night five years ago. As a single woman, it’s not terrible to have a dangerous reputation but life gets chaotic when she starts to get further job requests.

It’s described as ‘a feminist revenge thriller’ and I think it takes skill to pull that off successfully, which it definitely does.

White Cat Black Cat by Kelly Link, Head of Zeus, 2023

This is a collection of seven modern fairy tales. There is something reminiscent yet foreign in these stories. You think you know where they’re going but you’re wrong. There’s a character you recognise from childhood, heading in a familiar direction but then it all tilts and you’re in a completely different world.

The blurb on the back saying  ‘poised on the edges between magic, modernity and mundanity’ is bang on.

August is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien, Faber & Faber, 1965

This is Edna O’Brien (incidentally more Irish literature – though she lived in England for a long time). It’s going to be gorgeously written. It’s going to get into uncomfortable interior territory. She throws her first paragraph down with the ease of someone who has 20 books to her name.

What should be a sexual awakening and liberation for young divorcee Ellen, is something sad and sullied. Wow, to be a woman in the sixties!? The humiliation and shame that was attached to desire, the vulnerability and harassment of being a woman alone. This book was initially banned in several countries.

I’m not going to lie. This book is a downer. It well-written and it’s interesting but unless you like pressing at a bruise, I wouldn’t read it when you’re feeling fragile.

Rain Birds by Harriet McKnight, Black Inc.2017

I borrowed this from the library after reading Remember This a beautiful personal essay on friendship and grief by Susie Thatcher. She and the author Harriet McKnight were friends. They met at Canary Press, bonded over writing and played a big role in the development of each other’s writing. She wrote so lovingly about Harriet and Rain Birds that I had to read it too.

Pina is feeling isolated and over-it as she looks after her husband who has Alzheimer’s. Arianna is taking part in a project reintroducing black cockatoos into the local national park but she’s dubious about their donor organisation. I’m only two chapters in so far but the portent is that their paths will cross and changing things for both of them.

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How to say good bye to old slippers

I have these sad old slippers. They have holes in them. They’re dirty and their soles are long gone. But my Mum gave me these slippers years ago and I just can’t throw them out.

Once they were upright uggies.* They were clean and warm with a sole thick enough to walk outside in. Like all soles, they eventually cracked and wore through but my mum doesn’t give up on possessions that easily. She’s lived through a world war and rationing and she’s not one to throw out something which is otherwise still functioning if she can find a way to repair it.

So, she took the broken soles off and had a look through her sewing stuff. She found some leather pieces cut and collected from a footstool that had reached the end of its life – obviously it couldn’t be repaired but the leather could still be saved. Then she cut the scraps to match the soles of the slippers and sewed them on by hand with a stitch stronger than any I know.

I’ve been wearing them ever since.

My mum has Alzheimer’s now and all that practicality and resourcefulness has been packed off to a distant part of her brain. In current phone calls and visits, she’s on a very small memory loop and it’s sometimes hard to remember who she was. Throwing these slippers out feels like losing a tangible sample of the way she used to be.

Her spare room still has a sewing cupboard full of material, thread, buttons, bits and pieces. There are even some leather scraps left over from that same old footstool. We hated all the hand-me-downs, the mending and repairs. We wanted new things and used to roll our eyes at it all.

Now I just want to thank her for keeping my feet warm all those extra years.

*Ugg boots

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