Emma Gattey

Every morning, so far, I’m alive: A memoir by Wendy Parkins (Otago University Press, 2019), 216 pp., $35

Straddling the fraught realms of personal and familial history, diagnosis of mental illness and rehabilitation, restorative nature writing, travelogue and philosophy, this memoir doesn’t pick its battles. It tackles what might be the most consuming issue of human life: whether or not to continue at all. And it emerges triumphant. At its core, Wendy Parkins’ latest work is an act of self-help (and I use this term here in no pejorative sense), an epistemological performance, the living-through of philosophy. As readers, we join Parkins as she thinks through the meaning of life, answering the stark ultimatum posed by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.’ Camus is in fact one of the few famous suicide-philosophers whom Parkins does not cite or posthumously spar with or respond to. Nevertheless, this ur-question of philosophy looms large over this book. [Read more…]

Ruth Brown

From Cairo to Cassino: A memoir of Paddy Costello by Dan Davin, ed. Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, 2019) 94 pp., $25

When Clive Reading says he’s planning to kill himself, his fellow officer feels sorry for him but can’t help thinking he could do worse. For Reading has broken the sacred code that binds men together in time of war – he has deserted his men on the eve of battle: ‘Cleared out. Ratted. Buggered off. Said he had to report back to battalion.’

These men are characters in Dan Davin’s short story ‘Coming and Going’ in Breathing Spaces (1975), and the ethos that underpins the story also shapes Davin’s memoir of Paddy Costello. [Read more…]

Chris Else

Now When It Rains by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Steele Roberts, 2018), 286 pp., $34.99

I sometimes wonder about the viability of literary memoir. Why people write them seems obvious enough – there comes a time in the lives of some of us when our pasts demand to be examined – but why anyone should read them is more problematic. Three reasons come to mind. First, a fascination with a writer’s work might lead readers to seek exegetical insight from the circumstances of the life. Second, the mystique that surrounds the business of writing might result in a search for inspiration and illumination of the creative process. Third, we might assume that because writers can express themselves they will provide incisive psychological observations of a more general kind even when working with biographical material that, in other hands, might be unutterably dull. All these expectations might be satisfied by a good literary biography but, with a memoir, they would seem to set up an inevitable mismatch with the writer’s intention. The creation of any work moves from a state of potential to one of the actual, a process that is inevitably one of limitation. The result is always a version of what might have been written. In most genres this scarcely matters but with memoir there might seem to be an unresolvable paradox. If my aim is to realise certain things about myself, how can I be satisfied with a mere version? And if I am not engaged in realisation, what am I about? Looking for affirmation or attention? Trying to manage my public image? Providing an object lesson? Indulging myself? [Read more…]