Sally Blundell
What We Remember, What We Forget by Siobhan Harvey (Otago University Press, 2026), 192pp, $35
A working-class town in 1970s England. A place of mine closures, unemployment and curtain-twitching conformity. A world, writes poet and essayist Siobhan Harvey, where the creed of appearance ‘is absolute and rigid’.
In a bookless house in a small cul-de-sac, the cloying sweetness of The Carpenters—songs like ‘Close to You’ and ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’—is an incongruous soundtrack to the whacks and welts of a mother’s swinging Dr Scholl sandal and the savagery of a father’s rage. When their 17-year-old daughter announces she is gay, her father inflicts new wounds. ‘No one will ever love you,’ he says, as her mother watches on ‘with the same indifference she devoted to episodes of Casualty.’ As Harvey writes in ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things’, the first essay in this memoir and winner of the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition, those six loveless words ‘form an inexplicable point of origin’.
In May this year, Wellington poet Bill Manhire posted a poem on Twitter. It was called ‘How Memory Works’, and it went like this: ‘Come over here / we say to the days that disappear. // No, over here.’ In What We Remember, What We Forget, Harvey corrals those ‘days that disappear’ and the very idea of disappearance into 12 essays (some of which have appeared previously in journals and anthologies), bookended by a prologue and epilogue. She begins with the words hammered into her as a child: ‘I’m a failure’. As an 18-month-old, she was left alone in her mother’s bedroom with a bottle of pills on the bedside table. The overdose, the stomach pumping: ‘It was all your fault’, says her mother. Tripping over as a child: ‘What have you done to yourself!’; just missing out on being school dux: ‘She thinks she’s going to university! Over my dead body!’; the kitchen window shattered by the soapy hands of her younger brother: ‘Her sandal sings to me as it lands upon my back and arms. I hear its beat. I wail with its chants’.
She learns to hide her pain, her shame, within a wall of isolation. In one of the finest stories, ‘When My Best Friend Came to Stay’, 12-year-old Harvey savours the delicious secrecy of not eating. Like the bruises on her body, her dramatic weight loss is a cause not of parental alarm but social embarrassment. It is her fault, again.
Neighbours, even teachers, must have known about the beatings meted out to her and her brother, she reasons now. Why was nothing said? In ‘Of a Trial, Innocence, Guilt and a Plea’, she tracks the dismal record of children killed by parents and caregivers: Liam (4 years old); Christopher (also 4 years); Emma (15 months), another Emma (14 years). Their names, she writes, need to be recorded, memorialised. Only in that honouring, she argues, lies the possibility of change.
She tracks the anti-queer venom spilling into streets, legislative chambers, prisons and, via by-now ubiquitous TV sets, living rooms. Children are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay, harangues Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her 1987 Conservative Party speech: ‘All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life.’ ‘Too bloody right, those fuckin’ perverts,’ growls her father.
She packs her suitcase and quietly leaves. In London, first in a homeless shelter, then a housing association flat, she experiences the luxury of isolation and the solace of writing, ‘the closest thing I have to a long-term relationship’. Only once, in a heartbreaking episode, does she attempt to rejoin her family. It is Christmas. She knocks. Through the frosted glass door she sees her mother approach, turn, then disappear: ‘So I withdraw and never return … A family broken, in memory and time, by a puzzlement over identity.’
Harvey recognises the antecedents of such abuse: intergenerational poverty (her mother was the oldest of 11 children, raised in a council house by a gambler and a ‘hollowed-out wife’); intergenerational and culturally accepted violence. Does this excuse them? she asks. In adulthood, they had a choice whether to re-inflict their abusive childhoods, she answers herself: ‘As such, there are no excuses for their behaviour’.
She completes a PhD, falls in love and leaves the UK for New Zealand, but her father’s words, the flying sandal and the anti-queer rhetoric follow her: ‘I’m a fool for believing in the hermetic enclosure of escape.’ Here, the sense of being an outsider—an exile, an ‘outcast’—barrels in. She quotes Edward Said: ‘It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.’
At times this ‘essential sadness’ of the exile bleeds into aggrievance. Harvey and her partner—referred to here simply as ‘you’—struggle to find a house as lack of investment in social housing and rising property prices drive low-income buyers out of the market (they do eventually buy). Harvey struggles to secure a job or even a footing in New Zealand’s literary society.
But it is in her role as a mother, enclosing her young, curious, articulate son within a fortified tower of unconditional love, that she successfully rejects the abusive model set by her parents. Those fortifications are tested. As a gifted learner, later diagnosed with Asperger’s and ADHD, her son—referred to here and in an earlier collection of poetry as Cloudboy—is unfairly and cruelly punished by his teachers and bullied by his classmates. It is heartbreaking, incensing. You want to shout at these teachers. A later, highly publicised Ombudsman’s report censured the school’s handling of the bullying.
Her son’s birth, the mystery around the identity of her paternal grandfather, a prevailing sense of being an outsider and, perhaps, her role as senior lecturer in creative writing at AUT trigger an investigation into her ancestry. She scans a family photograph for family likeness. She clutches at what seem to be dubious straws of ancestral affiliation: a natural skill at helming a ship; an aptitude for horse-riding; an interest in Turkey (her great-granduncle served in Gallipoli); even an ancestral itinerancy ‘that I thought was mine alone’. She falls on Mary Knowles, author, needleworker, campaigner for the equality of women and abolition of slavery, born in 1733—it’s exhilarating, she writes, ‘to learn that, more than 200 years ago, a woman ancestor of mine also defied the dominant mores and ideologies of her time’.
In writing about what she calls this ‘festering in the past’, Harvey applies a near-lifetime of reading and research, particularly on the subject of memory. She addresses Socrates’ glib maxim, ‘Time is a great healer’. Sometimes, just sometimes, she writes, ‘it’s not’. She explores 17th-century philosopher John Locke’s idea that identity is a construct of what we remember—it takes falling in love to challenge this notion: ‘for I reside in your recollections, not just my own,’ she writes. She reads contemporary US psychologist Daniel Schacter’s explanations of ‘memory error’ in the process of recollection (Schacter’s three stages of memory—encoding, storage and retrieval—are used here as section headings).
The ‘forgetting’ of the book’s title is addressed in the epigraph, a quote from Polish Jewish writer Sholem Asch: ‘Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is the necessary condition of our existence.’ Harvey returns to this in her epilogue:
For so long, forgetting seemed like failure. Wiping away a learning outcome before the lesson concludes. The childhood neglect and abuse I experienced; the place I originated from, my being disowned and the enduring difficulties I’ve encountered in struggling to belong elsewhere; my raising and advocacy of a neurodiverse child: to forget all that meant to fail the girl I was, the woman I became, the mother I am and, most significant of all, our son.
Now, she argues, forgetting is an indispensable human facility, ‘as necessary to us as remembering’.
This careful balance between remembering and ‘forgetting’, silence and articulation, is a recurring feature of trauma fiction and memoir. Writing about her 1987 novel Beloved in The Guardian, Toni Morrison described ‘the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting’ that she used as a device in her narrative. ‘Nobody in the book can bear too long to dwell on the past,’ she wrote. ‘Nobody can avoid it.’
Morrison’s form of forgetting, as in Harvey’s book, is not the memory-erasing process built into Charlie Kaufman’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Rather, it is the ability to decouple the trauma of the past from a sense of self, to defuse its power. Harvey’s success in rejecting the legacy of that past is evident when her teenage son announces he is gay. She compares her parents’ response with her own: ‘One tells us we will be forever loveless; the other tells us we will be forever loved.’
Harvey writes with remarkable courage and clarity. Her descriptions are memorable, from her old schoolteachers, ‘bowed, half-broken, as they trudge towards their cars’, to the estuary in Auckland ‘offering complexions of itself as it shifts. Silver, turquoise, cyan, Verdigris, moonstone’.
The cover image is an overly literal illustration of a fractured sense of self, but in its lucid negotiation of Harvey’s past, with all its gaps and difficulties, her book presents a fine defence of memoir: ‘Volatile and intense; unstable and unreliable; nonlinear and subjective; random and selective; fragile and disordered: if these are the hallmarks of memory and how it works,’ she writes, ‘I see that, as a writer, they’re also the hallmarks of my creativity and how it works.’
SALLY BLUNDELL is a freelance journalist and writer living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury and was formerly the books and culture editor for the NZ Listener. She has contributed essays, reviews and articles to a wide range of publications. Her book on Ravenscar House in Christchurch, Ravenscar House: A biography, was published by Canterbury University Press in 2022.
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