Philip Temple

You Have a Lot to Lose: A memoir 1956–1986 by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2020), 403 pp., $49.99

Mark Twain first popularised the saying: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ Its origins may have derived from an earlier statement by an American judge who grouped witnesses into three classes: simple liars, damned liars and experts. The expert, he believed, did not state things he knew to be untrue, but through emphasis on certain parts of his narrative practised clever and effective evasion to present his version of the truth. This is germane to assessing any work of autobiography, in pursuit of understanding the realities of an author’s life and work, and what motives propel the narrative they want us to believe. [Read more…]

Simone Oettli-van Delden

Native Son: The writer’s memoir by Witi Ihimaera (Vintage, 2019), 448 pp., $40

Readers of Native Son, the sequel to Maori Boy (2014), will immediately be charmed by the photographs on the cover of Witi Ihimaera as an attractive young man; yet the splendid images belie much of the heartache within. This second volume of Ihimaera’s memoir is ostensibly about his life from the age of fifteen in 1959 to twenty-eight in 1971. But the framework of the story follows his troubled relationship with his paternal grandfather, Pera Punahāmoa Ihimaera Smiler, and the initial dates turn out to be slippery. His entanglement with Pera is only resolved in the final chapter, dated 2018, the year in which Ihimaera turned seventy-four. This is by no means the only break with temporal organisation. Though the text covers the promised period in terms of the events of Ihimaera’s life in a realistically haphazard fashion, the real focus is on his coming to terms with a traumatic experience he had in 1955, when he was eleven. On the other hand, discussions of his writing career take him right up to 1998 with Bulibasha: The king of the gypsies, and he mentions beginning work on the production of the opera Flowing Water in 2016, as well. Clearly the temporal range is far more extensive than initially indicated. [Read more…]

Emma Gattey

Someone’s Wife by Linda Burgess (Allen and Unwin, 2019), 300 pp., $37

Ploughing through Linda Burgess’s ‘sort-of memoir’, Someone’s Wife, I’d spent a ludicrous amount of time trying to figure out her literary kin, her fellow memoirists, only to have it pointed out that my cultural references were possibly all wrong. Someone’s Wife was neither emulating the literary gossip-riddled essays of Joan Didion or Eve Babitz (although she’s the closest New Zealand has to offer, Burgess’s All Black-adjacency the equivalent of their silver screen coterie) nor the highbrow television reviewing of Clive James (although she ticks that box, too). Instead, my (male) interlocutor tells me, these might be entirely the wrong comparisons. Surely she’s subverting the genre of sports memoir, the most widely read of all New Zealand book categories? He hasn’t read Burgess. I haven’t read The Real McCaw. Still, the two could not be more different. Chronologically and geographically, Someone’s Wife maps onto the life of a former All Black: her husband, Robert. But this is the closest we come to a sportsman’s biography, or hagiography from the sidelines. This is no spectator story, but the tightly crafted, fluid narration of a life fully lived. Bob Burgess features, of course. He’s there throughout, from their early courtship in New Zealand, through the pampered expatriate life in Lyon, to muted fights in the corridor, senior citizens hissing at one another, ‘right on the border between love and hate’. But he is neither lionised nor diminished. A silent partner: beloved, and never presumptuously spoken for.  [Read more…]