TURBINE | KAPOHAU

This is one of Kidman’s three memoirs. I liked her preface quote, ‘my life seemed to have been rich, interesting and fortunate … it seemed that nothing more would happen, and that the story was over … but things kept happening.’  She was referring to her older, later years.  

Throughout her essays, I found such clever, calming, accessible writing — similar to Levy and Cusk, only more calming. I’ve heard Fiona Kidman describe her own writing as ‘plain’. If by that she means informed, reflective, ironic, funny, knowing, sentimental (in the best sense of the word), curious, adventurous and confidently moving between ‘now’ and ‘back then’, I’d like to be a plain writer too. Throughout are observational jewels which are close descriptions of the object, place or person being described, but also the emotion associated with these observations. This results in a layered description; something that, with practice, I might be able to achieve.  

Kidman talks about memory, allowing that it is far from perfect, and made me understand that what I write is not a court record. Particularly since my occasional, and always abandoned, attempts at diary writing in the past gave me little on which to base or check my stories, unlike Kidman, who has assiduously completed diaries since the 1990s. 

She writes about her own life experience but also about the topics that she felt got a hold of her and would not let her go. Like her informed, empathetic and tenacious essay on Albert Black, the homesick boy who had been shipped to New Zealand and fell in amongst bodgies. I felt claustrophobic, almost panicked, reading Kidman’s quote from the stuffy, far right conservative, punitive Judge Finlay: ‘The offender is not one ours, except by adoption and comes from the type that we could well be spared in our country. He belongs to a peculiar sect, if you could call it that, or a peculiar association of individuals whose outlook on life differs from the normal.’ 

Far from my own experience, of course, and from a different era, but I have felt whiffs of this same stuffiness and conservatism as an immigrant to NZ, especially in some of the dark corners of Dunedin. Maybe I overstate that — but it gave me some understanding of the backstory of the country where I now live. Kidman’s references to the hard souls who decided on Albert’s death, despite doubt about the conviction and the mother’s entreaties, ruined lives far beyond that of the boy whom they hanged. This essay helped me to understand the power of having an idea or a question or an intellectual interest as Kidman did, that must be researched because the story will not leave us alone — like my own old days of research. 

Her ‘On Writing Memoir’ essay was the first I jumped at. Kidman has held her memoir classes for many years in the old Thistle Hotel. After reading the essay, I recently visited the Thistle Hotel where I attended her memoir classes over six consecutive Saturdays. I recognised its ambience immediately from her description. Walking through the hall, the stairs sloping on an angle, and looking at the photos on the walls was like walking through a written chapter interleaving present and past. For a reason to do with the history of the place, simply walking through that space was moving and significant in my acceptance and appreciation of this great country where I was unceremoniously deposited and dumped ten years ago! So reading the essay on her memoir classes, she talks about the student in the present-day class, and about the old hotel and Katherine Mansfield’s association with it. This encouraged me that interleaving is possible, even desirable in writing to get away from the chronological way I’d been writing and which was bogging me down. The authoritative way she talks about writing gives me confidence, which for me is so easily eroded. 

This heartfelt attachment to an individual she felt with Albert Black is evident in the essay on Marguerite Duras. I had previously come across Duras through Levy and Cusk. Duras, the thinking woman’s hero. I laughed when I read Kidman: ‘I have seen women writers, it is always women, claiming Marguerite Duras as a favourite author. When I see their embrace of her, I am filled with outrage, jealousy. You can’t have her, I want to tell them, she belongs to me … These women who want her for themselves, like a new discovery, are usually pretty good at what they do. They understand Duras, draw on her intensity, the recklessness of her mind. The rest see only her surfaces — the alcohol, the life lived with abandonment.’  

But it’s the immediacy of her research into Duras and her drive to uncover the ‘essence’ of Duras that I find remarkable and inspiring, and which took Kidman to Ho Chi Minh City and France (with which country Kidman has a strong association). Digging deep.  

Kidman summarises Duras’ writing process: ‘As I read it, it suggests a sense of abandonment, a letting go when immersed in writing with which I identify. Or, to put it another way, of bringing to the surface what has gone before, and finding in it what you want to say.’ (p119) Is this the essence of memoir? Reading this and Levy and Cusk, all part of the Duras ‘clan’, makes me want to lie down and weep. How are these women so clever? How did they get that way? How awe-inspiringly self-assured, I don’t know, perhaps they not only have / had huge brains and observational skills and empathy and understanding but didn’t have ADHD and terrible handwriting. 

 

Just Another Mountain: A memoir, Sarah Jane Douglas (2019)

  

I like reading about hiking and walking and the challenges of the outdoors as much as I like doing it. This book was recommended to me by women in the 17,000 strong Scottish Women’s Walking Group that I walk with whenever I am back in Scotland.   

An early quote from Douglas’s book, ‘sometimes all you can do is put one foot in front of the other… and just keep walking’ echoes my own favourite quote from Rebecca Solnit: ‘You may not know how to save your soul, but you know how to put one foot in front of the other.’ It’s one of the themes in my folio. Douglas’s book is another memoir in which the strands of her stories interweave. A central theme of the book is the writer’s abandonment by her biological father, resolution of that, her life with her mother’s second husband and the writer’s own search for her mother’s ‘love of her life’. 

The main sub-stories are her mother’s cancer and eventual death, and Douglas’ realisation that the details of her mother’s life are relatively unknown; the writer’s own struggles with alcohol (a common theme unfortunately in women’s memoirs); her relationships and her sense of blame about those failures. The lack of knowledge about her mother made me think about how few details of my own parents’ lives I actually know. The final strand is the writer’s own restoration and building a new life. ‘In the same way I had once used the bottle to bury all the hurt, I now found salvation in the freedom of wide, open spaces. Among mountains I enjoyed a natural high.’ A slight cliché.  

The book is structured around the writer climbing mountains, in particular Scottish Munros (a class of difficult mountains in Scotland over 925 metres), one to a chapter. Her description of the ascents and descents have you right there beside her through all sorts of challenges, and, in particular, the Scottish weather. She also climbs Kilimanjaro, as a long-held goal; and Ama Dablam in Nepal, on a quest. It is ultimately a quest memoir, in which the writer, in a departure from her solo expeditions, travels with her partner to Nepal. 

It is here where the man — the one cast as her mother’s ‘love of her life’ — was killed in a climbing accident many years before. The purpose of the quest was to find out as much as possible about him, which ends up being not a lot, and to find the cairn where he was memorialised. She finds it and this is where she scatters her mother’s ashes. Job done. It’s life writing of the type when you think, people get up to the darndest things. Following this accomplishment she said, ‘After all my troubles and failed relationships, feeling as if I’d been wandering aimlessly through life, I was finally confident I was on the right track. I now understood that, like being on a mountain at high altitude, life is a test of endurance. You just have to be patient, and know that no matter how tough things may seem there is always a way through the difficulties.’ (p255) The structural metaphor and symbolism of climbing mountains seems to bring all this together. In my own folio can I use building as a metaphor?  

Another scene spoke to me (p123). I was about to spread my mother’s ashes in a particular spot in the far northwest of Scotland. I took the box of her ashes out of the car boot and sat it on my knee. Mum formed in front of me. My hands were on the box and her body shape, life-size, filled my hands. It was exactly what she felt like. I was excited to feel and hold her again. Perhaps her energy was hard to suppress even six years after her death. In contrast, the box holding my father’s ashes that I had taken out the boot a few minutes previously were inert.  

In the section recounting Douglas walking away from the hospital where her mother had died, she felt ‘as though her spirit had wrapped me up from the inside out like a protective cloak — as though her soul had jumped into my body — and at that moment, in the strangest ways I felt comforted.’  It seemed to be as clear to Douglas and as palpable as I had experienced with my mother. I felt it really did happen, as it happens to others. She also describes the context in the most evocative way: ‘The October wind sent a few rusty-coloured leaves scuttling across my path. The sun pursued its course behind the clouds and the cold steely, grey of day pressed down from all sides, swallowing me whole.’   

I learned useful elements in this memoir to think about for my own: 

1. It’s important to have a structure that links different elements of the story to keep the reader engaged; 
2. There need to be setbacks and difficulties;  
3. Description of emotional pain can’t be too sentimental or cliched;  
4. Acknowledgement of our own contribution to problems; 
5. Once the story is written its important, along with other editing, to make sure the story is not too deft, or pat, too full of co-incidences and trickery, it needs to ring true; 
6. Be careful to not make it look as though a lot is being held back; I felt it was in Douglas’s story and hoped that my own story would not feel like that.