Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review
Helen Watson White
To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge by Rosemary Riddell (Upstart Press, 2021), 229pp, $39.99
‘What if we could be honest about our pain?’ asks film/theatre director and lawyer Rosemary Riddell in her memoir To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge. Not perhaps the question you’d expect from a judge, considering the usual preconceptions of the role. [Read more…]
Wendy Parkins
Notes on Womanhood by Sarah Jane Barnett (Otago University Press, 2022), 169pp, $30; You Probably Think This Song is About You by Kate Camp (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 223pp, $35
These two books, written from the vantage point of midlife, adopt different approaches to tell their stories. Sarah Jane Barnett’s Notes on Womanhood is the first in a new series from Otago University Press, Ka Haea Te Ata, that aims to cast light on issues of importance in Aotearoa today. It interweaves Barnett’s own experiences with a wide range of secondary research in order to bring the deeply personal into dialogue with broader cultural concerns and the structural inequities that shape women’s lives. Kate Camp’s book, by contrast, takes the form of linked essays, an increasingly popular mode in memoir writing, perhaps because it allows a writer the freedom to present relatively self-contained episodes from life, without the need to fill all the gaps that a single linear narrative might require. In both cases, though, the difficulties of growing up female are approached with candour, allowing readers the space to recognise or reflect on their own experiences. [Read more…]
Mary Macpherson
Gaylene’s Take: Her Life in New Zealand Film by Gaylene Preston (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 367pp, $40; droplet by Sheryl Campbell (self-published, 2022), 96pp, $80
Cinema and its close relative, the still image, are among the important ways we understand the world in the twenty-first century. Whether they’re staged fiction or taken from the world, images tell us stories about ourselves and society. But what shapes the narratives is the sensibility behind the lens and the intention of the storyteller. In these two books, Gaylene’s Take, a memoir by Dame Gaylene Preston, and droplet, a photobook by Sheryl Campbell, we see the power of work by female image-makers and feel the influence of feminism, which has helped rewrite society’s behaviour toward women since the nineteenth century and earlier. [Read more…]
Wendy Parkins
Raiment: A Memoir by Jan Kemp (Massey University Press, 2022), 255 pp, $35; Things I Learned at Art School by Megan Dunn (Penguin, 2021), 352 pp, $35
In 1971, the Canadian author Alice Munro wrote: ‘There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women … All women have had up till now has been their connection with men.’ Two years later, the US Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v Wade—a decision that has recently been reversed. It is difficult, sometimes, not to feel that Munro’s optimism was misplaced, that women’s connection with men is still too often the defining condition of their existence.
These memoirs by Jan Kemp and Megan Dunn provide an opportunity to reflect on the changing lives of girls and women during the past fifty years in Aotearoa. Though wildly different in tone and style, as well as the time frames on which they focus—the counter-culture of the late 60s and early 70s in Kemp’s Raiment; 1990s postmodernism in Dunn’s Things I Learned At Art School—both memoirs recount their author’s quest for self-expression and independence within creative sub-cultures in Auckland. [Read more…]
Rachel O’Connor
The Birds Began to Sing: A memoir of a New Zealand composer by Dorothy Buchanan (Cuba Press, 2021), 240pp, $40; Unposted, Autumn Leaves: A memoir in essays by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, 2021), 340pp, $30
Reflections on our own past are unavoidably narcissistic, and the motivations and justifications for writing a memoir are always complicated. As Jesse Mulligan pointed out on Radio NZ earlier this year, when discussing Charlotte Grimshaw’s explosive memoir, The Mirror Book, we don’t want to read about just anyone’s life. To make your life story worth paying for and perusing by strangers, it needs to be remarkable.
Christchurch-born Dorothy Buchanan’s life certainly qualifies. Her long career as a musician and composer has been exceptionally productive and has left an indelible mark on New Zealand’s musical development and canon. Her compositions and their recordings are numerous and celebrated (though Peace Song perhaps remains most widely loved and known), and a string of awards is testimony to the professional regard in which she is held. In 2001, she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for a lifetime’s involvement in music. [Read more…]
Wendy Parkins
Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, 2022), 269pp, $35
‘When I was very small, I loved wolves, she told me.’ The broadcaster Noelle McCarthy begins her memoir with a recollection of early childhood that alludes to an almost fairy-tale world. But look again at that deceptively simple opening sentence: ‘When I was very small, I loved wolves, she told me.’ From the beginning, the past is mediated through the mother. She is the one who—for good or ill—first tells our story, tells us who we are. Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter presents a moving story of beginnings and endings, frankly detailing a childhood damaged by a mother’s alcoholism and McCarthy’s own journey of recovery from the same addiction. [Read more…]