Category Archives: Memoir

May 25, 2024 · 4:10 pm

The Postcard – Anne Berest

The Postcard – Anne Berest

I managed to borrow this from the library using my Kobo – it was very easy. I have known about this book for a while and was keen to read it, but it took some time to get to it.

Here’s the blurb …

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.

Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.

This was a very interesting story, and I am very impressed at how Anne and her mother found all of the information. It’s a sad story and you have to wonder how much past trauma effects the next generation. Knowing what happens in WW2, I wanted them to stay in Palestine, and then leave France, sadly they just kept trying to do the right thing, assuming everyone would be decent people.

A review.

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December 5, 2023 · 5:31 pm

Graft – Maggie MacKellor

Graft – Maggie MacKellor

I saw this on someone’s Instagram feed and then it popped up on Borrowbox, so I thought why not?

Here’s the blurb …

In my mind I walk over the land. I run my hands through the grass as if it were the hair on my head. I dig my fingers into the dirt as if the soil were the crust of my skin.In Graft, Maggie MacKellar describes a year on a Merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania, and all of life – and death – that surrounds her through the cycle of lambing seasons. She gives us the land she knows and loves, the lambs she cares for, the ewes she tries to save, the birds around her, and the dogs and horses she adores.This book is a stunning thanksgiving for a place and a moment in motherhood; and a timely reminder of the inescapable elemental laws of nature.Susan Duncan on When It ‘An unforgettable story of love and courage that inspires even as it breaks your heart.’

This is beautiful, her writing is fabulous. As a mother whose children are beginning to leave the nest, I felt she was putting my feelings into words. And her descriptions of her environment – the birds, the sheep, the lambs (and how the ewes mother their lambs) are lovely. And her descriptions of farming; surviving the drought, lambing, shearing make a non-farmer like me appreciate the hard ships.

This is such a moving, heart felt memoir. Anyone who is a parent, or a farmer, or just interested in people would enjoy this book.

A review

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October 31, 2023 · 2:36 pm

Pardon My French – Rachael

Pardon My French – Rachael Mogan McIntosh

This was a birthday present. I have long harboured the idea of moving to the french countryside. Here’s the blurb …

At the school gate, when she accidentally kissed one new friend on the nose and called another a ‘beautiful man-horse’, Rachael realised that small-town France could hardly be more different to beach-side Australia. The smell of cigarettes replaced the tang of bone-broth and sprouted sourdough, the neighbours sometimes came to blows and under no circumstances would anyone wear activewear in public. Ever.

Muddling through every interaction in terrible French pushed Rachael’s family to their limits. Some days, everybody cried and ate their feelings with almond croissants. But the town of Sommières embraced these ragtag Australians, and the family fell in love with their temporary hometown and its outrageous gossip, cobblestoned beauty and kind, eccentric inhabitants.

Pardon My French is a candid, hilarious love letter to family life and France with three valuable lessons for overcoming adversity: make home a beautiful nest, lean into the tough lessons and look for the comedy in everything.

This book is funny and interesting (and it’s definitely not the Instagram only parts of the year). It also seemed incredibly hard and I am not sure I would have been able to subject my children to it. I am not one who values experience over enjoyment.

There are many laugh out loud moments (usually involving language misunderstandings) and I was interested in the french educational system compared to Australia – two hours for lunch and you can go home – although I guess that just makes the school day longer?

I also enjoyed her musings on parenting and how she and Keith managed the various needs to their three children.

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August 6, 2023 · 8:30 pm

Behind the Seams – Esme Young

Behind the Seams – Esme Young

This was given to me as a gift, and as a fan of The Great British Sewing Bee, I was very keen to read this book.

From adventures at Central Saint Martins to The Great British Sewing Bee , go behind the scenes of Esme Young’s amazing life…

At age five, Esme was asked to write in her notebook, but instead, she filled it with drawings – the only way she knew to express herself. At seven, when it was discovered she was partially deaf, she found refuge in her sketchbooks. Shortly after, Esme made her first garment and a passion for sewing and designing was born. As a teenager, she made her way to London where her creative journey truly began.

Living in a squat with other young creatives, Esme made the most of her time; studying at Central Saint Martins, launching a clothing line called Swanky Modes with three friends and £50 each, watching Notting Hill Carnival with David Bowie, and altering a dress for Cher. The ’90s saw a career move into costumes for films, where she designed outfits for Trainspotting , Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Beach , before she moved onto the small screen herself.

A celebration of a creative life lived differently, Behind the Seams is a reminder that it’s never too early, or too late to pick up a needle and start stitching in a new direction.

This was great, so much that I didn’t know or expect. From the sewing bee, I knew about her work at Central Saint Martins, but nothing about the rest of her career. And what an amazing career it is; fashion and costume design, fabulous collaborations.

The driving impulse seems to be to say yes (almost all the time) to all opportunities.

If you’re interested in textiles, fashion, sewing, pattern cutting or the sewing bee, then this book will interest you.

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July 13, 2023 · 12:29 pm

Mrs Gaskell and Me – Nell Stevens

Mrs Gaskell and Me – Nell Stevens

I first heard of Nell Stevens on the Backlisted podcast – they were discussing Mrs Gaskell’s North and South (one of my favourite books – and there is a fabulous television adaptation). And this sounded right up my alley – I have already read something similar about George Eliot, and there was My Salinger Year, not to forget My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. Now I need someone to write one about Austen.

Here’s the blurb …

In 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different lies, that Mrs Gaskell couldn’t stand it any more. She threw her book out into the world and disappeared to Italy with her two eldest daughters. In Rome she found excitement, inspiration, and love: a group of artists and writers who would become lifelong friends, and a man – Charles Norton – who would become the love of Mrs Gaskell’s life, though they would never be together.

In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her Ph.D. – about the community of artists and writers living in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century – and falling drastically in love with a man who lives in another city. As Nell chases her heart around the world, and as Mrs Gaskell forms the greatest connection of her life, these two women, though centuries apart, are drawn together.

Mrs Gaskell and Me is about unrequited love and the romance of friendship, it is about forming a way of life outside the conventions of your time, and it offers Nell the opportunity – even as her own relationship falls apart – to give Mrs Gaskell the ending she deserved.

I enjoyed both stories – Mrs Gaskell’s and Nell’s. I had no idea that Mrs Gaskell was in love with a man who was not her husband. I have always pictured her as a religious women who lived through some tragedies (didn’t her son die young?). Both Nell and Mrs Gaskell were longing for me who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) return their feelings. It’s about keeping going when you can’t have what you want and you don’t know what to want instead.

A review

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April 29, 2023 · 12:30 pm

The Land Before Avocado – Richard Glover

The Land Before Avocado – Richard Glover

I received this book as part of a book club christmas exchange, but in the end I ended up listening to it on Borrowbox (Richard Glover is the reader, so I recommend it).

Here’s the blurb …

The new book from the bestselling author of Flesh Wounds. A funny and frank look at the way Australia used to be – and just how far we have come. “It was simpler time”. We had more fun back then”. “Everyone could afford a house”. There’s plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It’s a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing. It’s the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Let’s break the news now: they didn’t have avocado. It’s a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes – often enshrined in law – towards anybody who didn’t fit in. The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, be angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Most of all it will make you realise how far we’ve come – and how much further we can go.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Australia and I remember much of what he talks about. What I remember distinctly is how mean adults were to children – including parents and grand parents (and no one ever believed the child). Adults felt they could say (and possibly do) anything to children. I remember my neighbour always commenting on my weight. My mother trained my budgie to say ‘[my name] is a nuisance’. I have never thought it was better in the past. This book is both hilarious and sobering; no avocado or alfresco tables, the road toll and treatment of women and children (well anyone that wasn’t a white man).

A review

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April 16, 2023 · 5:39 pm

The Year of Reading Dangerously – Andy Miller

The Year of Reading Dangerously – Andy Miller

I listen to the backlisted podcast and have done so for a few years, so I bought this book on my Kindle (Andy Miller is one of the presenters) and it languished and finally I decided to listen to it. Andy is the narrator and I highly recommend listening to it.

Here’s the blurb

A working father whose life no longer feels like his own discovers the transforming powers of great (and downright terrible) literature in this laugh-out-loud memoir.

Andy Miller had a job he quite liked, a family he loved, and no time at all for reading. Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he’d always wanted to read. Books he’d said he’d read that he actually hadn’t. Books that whispered the promise of escape from the daily grind. And so, with the turn of a page, Andy began a year of reading that was to transform his life completely.

This book is Andy’s inspirational and very funny account of his expedition through literature: classic, cult, and everything in between. Beginning with a copy of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita that he happens to find one day in a bookstore, he embarks on a literary odyssey. From Middlemarch to Anna Karenina to A Confederacy of Dunces, this is a heartfelt, humorous, and honest examination of what it means to be a reader, and a witty and insightful journey of discovery and soul-searching that celebrates the abiding miracle of the book and the power of reading.

I think this is quite a masculine selection of novels, but are we all going to agree on what makes a book great? I enjoyed this personal approach to reading and I particularly enjoyed the more personal sections – how his parents took him to the library on Saturday mornings, all his meetings with Douglas Adams, he and his wife reading War and Peace together.

If you enjoy reading, and reading about reading, then you will enjoy this reading adventure.

A review

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April 10, 2023 · 5:37 pm

Patchwork – Claire Wilcox

Patchwork – A Life Amongst Clothes – Clare Wilcox

I have had this book on my Kindle for quite some time, but I am making a concerted effort to read some of my digital pile. My Kindle is easy to take around with me, so I don’t know why it has taken me so long to read it.

Here’s the blurb

An expert and intimate exploration of a life in clothes: their memories and stories, enchantments and spells.

A linen sheet, smooth with age. A box of buttons, mother-of-pearl and plastic, metal and glass, rattling and untethered. A hundred-year-old pin, forgotten in a hem. Fragile silks and fugitive dyes, fans and crinolines, and the faint mark on leather from a buckle now lost.

Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues care for, catalogue and conserve clothes centuries old, the inscrutable remnants of lives long lost to history; the commonplace or remarkable things that survive the bodies they once encircled or adorned.

In Patch Work, Wilcox deftly stitches together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother’s black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear: their stories, their secrets, their power to transform and disguise and acts as portals to our pasts; the ways in which they measure out our lives, our gains and losses, and the ways we use them to write our stories.

This book is a memoir told in terms of textiles. Musings about various events in her life – both personal and professional. The writing is beautiful and the chapters are the perfect length (I kept thinking just one more).

A Youtube of an interview with Claire Wilcox.

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February 7, 2023 · 1:35 pm

I am, I am, I am – Maggie O’Farrell

I am, I am, I am – Maggie O’Farrell

I do like books by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet was one of my favourite books of 2020. This was a christmas present and I was very keen to read it.

Here’s he blurb …

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O’Farrell’s astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter–for whom this book was written–from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life’s myriad dangers.

Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O’Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.

This was a very interesting way to write a memoir. She had so many brushes with death and not just through accident or illness, she met people who meant her harm. The majority of the chapters (but not all) are about her brushes with death; illness as a child, near drownings, weird men on paths while hiking, child birth, etc. She writes extremely movingly about miscarriage and her daughter’s severe allergies.

It’s very easy to read and you don’t need to read it all at once, you could just do a chapter every now and then.

A review

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August 22, 2022 · 9:44 pm

Embroidering Her Truth – Clare Hunter

Embroidering Her Truth – Clare Hunter

I have Clare’s earlier book Threads of Life and I have heard her speak at some events (Selvedge and Royal School of Needlework). I find her and her research fascinating.

Here’s the blurb …

An alternative biography of Mary, Queen of Scots through the textiles of her life from the author of Sunday Times bestseller Threads of Life

I felt that Mary was there, pulling at my sleeve, willing me to appreciate the artistry, wanting me to understand the dazzle of the material world that shaped her.

At her execution Mary, Queen of Scots wore red. Widely known as the colour of strength and passion, it was in fact worn by Mary as the Catholic symbol of martyrdom.

In sixteenth-century Europe women’s voices were suppressed and silenced. Even for a queen like Mary, her prime duty was to bear sons. In an age when textiles expressed power, Mary exploited them to emphasise her female agency. From her lavishly embroidered gowns as the prospective wife of the French Dauphin to the fashion dolls she used to encourage a Marian style at the Scottish court and the subversive messages she embroidered in captivity for her supporters, Mary used textiles to advance her political agenda, affirm her royal lineage and tell her own story.

In this eloquent cultural biography, Clare Hunter exquisitely blends history, politics and memoir to tell the story of a queen in her own voice.

I really enjoyed reading this, hearing about all of the sumptuous fabrics and the embroidery. And the symbolism of the embroidery, the cat and the mouse, etc. I also liked the parts about Clare’s own textile practice and her trips to various Marian locations. If you like history, women’s history, and textiles, then I think you will love this book.

I would have liked the book to have pictures/images, but perhaps that would have made it unaffordable.

A review.

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