Category Archives: Memoir

April 19, 2022 · 8:28 pm

The Jane Austen Remedy – Ruth Wilson

The Jane Austen Remedy – Ruth Wilson

I heard about this book on a book podcast (ABC Book Shelf perhaps?) and I was super keen to read it.

Here’s the blurb

An uplifting and delightfully bookish memoir about an 89-year-old woman who reclaims her life by re-reading each of Jane Austen’s novels.

As she approached the age of seventy, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice. Unable to dismiss her feelings of unexplainable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a sunshine-yellow cottage in the Southern Highlands where she lived alone for the next decade.

Ruth had fostered a lifelong love of reading, and from the moment she first encountered Pride and Prejudice in the 1940s she had looked to Jane Austen’s heroines as her models for the sort of woman she wanted to become.

As Ruth settled into her cottage, she resolved to re-read Austen’s six novels and rediscover the heroines who had inspired her; to read between the lines of both the novels and her own life. And as she read, she began to reclaim her voice.

The Jane Austen Remedy is a beautiful, life-affirming memoir of love, self-acceptance and the curative power of reading. Published the year Ruth turns ninety, it is an inspirational account of the lessons learned from Jane Austen over nearly eight decades, as well as a timely reminder that it’s never too late to seize a second chance.

It was great – part memoir, part literary criticism. So many books were mentioned! It made me want to re-read all of Austen novels. My only criticism is that there wasn’t an index (or list) of all of the books mentioned.

A review.

A webage at the University of Sydney about Dr Wilson

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January 31, 2022 · 8:03 pm

No Friend But the Mountain – Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani

This is my book club book for January, I had never heard of it.

Here’s the blurb

Where have I come from? From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chants, the land of mountains…

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island. He has been there ever since.

People would run to the mountains to escape the warplanes and found asylum within their chestnut forests…

This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile.

Do Kurds have any friends other than the mountains? 

This is a very personal account of life in detention on Manus Island. Every Australian should read it. I knew it was terrible, but I didn’t know that it was designed to be terrible.

A review

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October 5, 2021 · 4:19 pm

Museum of Words – Georgia Blain

The Museum of Words – Georgia Blain

A friend recommended Georgia Blain and I found this one in the library.

In late 2015, Georgia Blain was diagnosed with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain. Prior to this, Georgia’s only warning had been a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry. She ignored it, and on a bright spring day, as she was mowing the lawn, she collapsed on a bed of blossoms, blood frothing at her mouth.

Waking up to find herself in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital, she tries to answer questions, but is unable to speak. After the shock of a bleak prognosis and a long, gruelling treatment schedule, she immediately turns to writing to rebuild her language and herself.

At the same time, her mother, Anne Deveson, moves into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s; weeks earlier, her best friend and mentor had been diagnosed with the same brain tumour. All three of them are writers, with language at the core of their being.

The Museum of Words is a meditation on writing, reading, first words and last words, picking up thread after thread as it builds on each story to become a much larger narrative. This idiosyncratic and deeply personal memoir is a writer’s take on how language shapes us, and how often we take it for granted — until we are in danger of losing it.

This is an extraordinary memoir; beautiful and heart-wrenching.

A review

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December 3, 2019 · 3:59 pm

Ghost Empire – Richard Fidler

Ghost Empire – Richard Fidler

I bought this book solely for the cover and then ended up listening to it on Audible!

Here’s the blurb …

GHOST EMPIRE is a rare treasure – an utterly captivating blend of the historical and the contemporary, realised by a master storyteller.
In 2014, Richard Fidler and his son Joe made a journey to Istanbul. Fired by Richard’s passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire – centred around the legendary Constantinople – we are swept into some of the most extraordinary tales in history. The clash of civilizations, the fall of empires, the rise of Christianity, revenge, lust, murder. Turbulent stories from the past are brought vividly to life at the same time as a father navigates the unfolding changes in his relationship with his son.

GHOST EMPIRE is a revelation: a beautifully written ode to a lost civilization, and a warmly observed father-son adventure far from home

This book is part memoir, history and travel journal. It has a lovely story-telling feel to it – made all the better by Richard Fidler reading the audio version. I listened to it while running, gardening, knitting and cleaning – I grabbed any opportunity to listen (in fact my house is cleaner than normal because I manufactured tasks so I could listen).

A review here and this is Richard Fidler’s web page.

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May 6, 2019 · 2:35 pm

Heart: A History – Sandeep Jauhar

Heart A History – Sandeep Jauhar

A friend lent me this book said I would like it, but I wasn’t convinced. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I did like it – very much (apart from some of the experiments – sharing a vascular system with a dog?) and I learnt interesting things.

Here’s the blurb …


The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul – the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence. It’s so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can even suffer such distress from emotional trauma as to physically change shape.

Practising cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar beautifully weaves his own experiences with the defining discoveries of the past to tell the story of our most vital organ. We see Daniel Hale Williams perform the first open heart surgery and Wilson Greatbatch invent the pacemaker – by accident. Amid gripping scenes from the operating theatre, Jauhar tells the moving tale of his family’s own history of heart problems and, looking to the future, he outlines why the way we choose to live will be more important than any device we invent.

Definitely worth reading if you like social history and have a bit of an interest in science.

Another review and another.

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June 26, 2017 · 3:51 pm

The Button Box – Lynn Knight

The Button Box – Lynn Knight

I loved this book – social history, fashion history, contemporary literature and buttons! Here is the blurb …

I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma’s buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin.

An inlaid wooden chest the size of a shoe box holds Lynn Knight’s button collection. A collection that has been passed down through three generations of women: a chunky sixties-era toggle from a favourite coat, three tiny pearl buttons from her mother’s first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning. Each button tells a story.

‘They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us’ said Virginia Woolf of clothes. The Button Box traces the story of women at home and in work from pre-First World War domesticity, through the first clerical girls in silk blouses, to the delights of beading and glamour in the thirties to short skirts and sexual liberation in the sixties.

I first heard of this book here and was intrigued – a quick pop to the book depository and a copy was winging its way to me. It then languished in my pile… however, I have been going through my pile picking and choosing what I want to read.

Each chapter starts with  a button (Jet button, glove button etc) but moves onto what is happening in the world at that time and also what was happening in women’s lives at that time. I particularly enjoyed the references to literature and now have a stack of new novelists I want to read – Barbara Comyns, Rosamond Lehmann, E. M Delafield and many more.

If you are at all interested in social history, fashion history or women’s history, then this is the book for you.

Another review …

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/10/the-button-box-lifting-the-lid-on-womens-lives-lynn-knight-review

 

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June 30, 2016 · 3:35 pm

What days are for – Robert Dessaix

What days are for - Robert Dessaix

What days are for – Robert Dessaix

I have never read anything by Robert Dessaix and I am not sure if I would have sought him out on my own, but this was a gift, so I gave it a go and I am very glad I did.

Here is the blurb …

Witty, acerbic, insightful musings from Robert Dessaix, one of Australia’s finest writers.
One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says F**K YOU.
What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’. What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved – and why?
This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality

This book has a lovely conversational style – I always enjoy hearing people’s stories and when it is as eloquent as this, then it is a joy to read.

More reviews …

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/robert-dessaixs-new-memoir-what-days-are-for-20141111-11jfde.html

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/robert-dessaixs-what-days-are-for-is-an-illuminating-memoir/news-story/b9a96a866b7ecb01654a14059f130b16

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March 2, 2016 · 2:16 pm

H is for Hawk – Helen MacDonald

H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald

H is for Hawk – Helen MacDonald

Several people suggested that I read this, but I resisted. The blurb (see below) didn’t really appeal to me – I am not all that interested in birds and I had a terrible relationship with my Dad, so I didn’t want to be reminded of what I didn’t have, but eventually I gave in and read it. I am glad I did because it is not just about birds and grief, it is about finding your way to live in the world.

Here is the blurb …

When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, Helen had never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk, but in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.
Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer’s eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

So this is about Helen MacDonald overcoming her grief by training a goshawk, but it is also a memoir of T.H. White. And both of those are about making peace with yourself (accepting your nature and desires) and making a contented life for yourself.

I am quite nosy so I do like reading about other peoples’ lives – how they live and what they thought etc. This is a very personal story – I am in awe of anybody who can put so much of themselves into the world.

More reviews …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/04/h-is-for-hawk-review-helen-macdonald-taming-goshawk-mabel

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/books/review/helen-macdonalds-h-is-for-hawk.html?_r=0

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October 30, 2014 · 3:21 pm

My Salinger Year – Joanna Rakoff

My Salinger Year - Joanna Rakoff

My Salinger Year – Joanna Rakoff

This memoir came highly recommended by several people and as I had read and liked My Life in Middlemarch, I thought this would be just the book for me.

I bought it as a reward for finishing me second half-marathon (this one) – it was really hard.

Anyway, here is the blurb …

Poignant, keenly observed, and irresistibly funny: a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself entangled with one of the last great figures of the century.
At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office, where dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches. At night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Williamsburg apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities, and struggling to trust her own artistic instinct, Rakoff is tasked with answering Salinger’s voluminous fan mail. But as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world, she finds herself unable to type out the agency’s decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger’s devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back. Over the course of the year, she finds her own voice by acting as Salinger’s, on her own dangerous and liberating terms.
Rakoff paints a vibrant portrait of a bright, hungry young woman navigating a heady and longed-for world, trying to square romantic aspirations with burgeoning self-awareness, the idea of a life with life itself. Charming and deeply moving, filled with electrifying glimpses of an American literary icon, My Salinger Year is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer. Above all, it is a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives and awaken our true selves.

This is an account of year in Ms Rakoff’s life when she worked at Salinger’s literary agency.

It reminded me a bit of The Best of Everything – young people in New York working in the publishing industry.

It is charming. From descriptions of her freezing (and then gas polluted apartment) in Williamsburg to her rare interactions with Jerry, her transition from writing form letters to fans to writing individual letters, her shock at her parents taking out a student loan in her name and finding herself living with her boyfriend without really discussing or agreeing to it – it is all delightful.

The writing is beautiful – deceptively simple (I am sure it is very difficult to master a simple style).

More reviews …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/06/my-salinger-year-joanna-rakoff-review-memoir

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/books/review/my-salinger-year-by-joanna-rakoff.html?_r=0

 

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October 21, 2013 · 2:25 pm

The Coat Route – Meg Lukens Noonan

The Coat Route - Meg Lukens Noonan

The Coat Route – Meg Lukens Noonan

I first heard about this book at a school fund raiser and I was intrigued by the whole coat making process.

Here is the blurb …

In today’s world of fast fashion, is there a place for a handcrafted $50,000 coat?

To answer that question, Meg Noonan unravels the story of the coat’s provenance. Her journey takes readers to the Sydney studio of John Cutler, a fourth-generation tailor who works magic with scissors and thread; to the remote mountains of Peru, where villagers shear vicunas (a rare animal known for its soft fleece); to the fabulous Florence headquarters of Stefano Ricci, the world’s greatest silk designer; to the esteemed French textile company Dormeuil; to the English button factory that makes products out of Indian buffalo horn; and to the workshop of the engraver who made the 18-carat gold plaque that sits inside the collar.

These individual artisans and family-owned companies are part of the rich tapestry of bespoke tailoring, which began in 17th-century London. They have stood against the tide of mass consumerism, but their dedication to their craft is about more than maintaining tradition; they have found increasing reason to believe that their way is best — for customers, for the environment, and for the workers involved.

Fascinating, surprising, and entertaining, The Coat Route is a timely love song to things of lasting value in our disposable culture.

As I am interested in textiles, I found this book fascinating. I hadn’t even heard of Vicuna, but I now appreciate why it is so expensive (although I do want to know if it is available in colours other than black, navy and brown). All of the steps involved in making the coat were interesting and very labour intensive. It is quite unsettling that these people might be the last people to make these objects. Surely the world will be a worse place if all we have is cheap fashion made by people who don’t earn a living wage. And what a fabulous opportunity for John Cutler – to be able to make the perfect coat (with no financial considerations).

I know it does sound a bit obscene a $50 000 coat, but what about a $6 000 coat the lasts for thirty years? I can understand the argument for good quality clothing that lasts a long time.

As an Australian, I found Australia being described by an American a bit odd. Robert Hawke who’s that? Oh she means Bob! And John Thompson? Surely she means Jack and I don’t think I have ever heard of Manly being described as a resort town six miles north of Sydney. But, this book is written for a global audience and not ‘know it all’ Australians.

I think if you are interested in Textiles, Bespoke Tailoring, Slow Fashion or just traditional crafts, then I think you will find this book interesting.

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