Category Archives: Memoir

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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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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