• Home
  • About
  • Landfall
  • Subscribe
  • Essay competition
  • Kathleen Grattan Award

Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Parade of Humanity

February 1, 2023 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: law, memoir

Note to Self

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: memoir

‘Disobedience and Bravery’: The Power of Female Image-Making

December 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: art and photography, memoir

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

August 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: memoir

Muses in a Hall of Mirrors

August 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: memoir

Home Truths

July 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: memoir

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 11
  • Next Page »

Recent reviews

  • Hug Your Mother, Hold Her
    Vincent O’Sullivan on What Fire by Alice Miller; Unseasoned Campaigner by Janet Newman
  • The Killer Gene 
    Erik Kennedy on A Riderless Horse by Tim Upperton; Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton; Surrender by Michaela Keeble
  • Matrix of Shape-Shifting
    David Eggleton on Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori art edited by Nigel Borell
  • Parade of Humanity
    Helen Watson White on To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge by Rosemary Riddell
  • Writing Ourselves into Existence
    Laura Toailoa on Sweat and Salt Water: Selected works by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa edited and compiled by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson and Terence Wesley-Smith

Subscribe to Landfall Review Online via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to Landfall Review Online and receive notifications of new reviews by email.

Review archive

Reviews by genre

© 2018 Otago University Press. All Rights Reserved. Website by Arts Net

 

Loading Comments...