memoir

Dick’s Pics

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Me, According to the History of Art by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press, 2021), 312pp, $65

It goes without saying that Dick Frizzell is a very clever man with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Somehow, he has also survived half a century or so’s worth of New Zealand art-world vicissitudes, so inevitably his thoughts about art are going to be interesting. He is also (and this is not intended as an insult) a narcissist. You would have to have the balls to write your own history of world art, playing at being Kenneth Clark. You also must be a bit of a celebrity for a publisher to let you do it. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Behold: Me, According to the History of Art. Frizzell does to art history what Tom Scott did to Charles Upham. [Read more…]

Broken Threads

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Wendy Parkins

This Pākehā Life: An unsettled memoir by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 240pp, $39.99

Home is where we start from, to borrow a phrase from the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who in turn adapted it from T.S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’. According to Winnicott, we develop our sense of self in relation to others from earliest infancy. We seek connection, intimacy and reciprocity, and whether we find those vital qualities at home or not plays a determining role in the kind of self that begins there.¹ For Eliot, by contrast, home is where we start from, a fixed point of departure. Like the past, home is something we must leave behind, for good or ill, as we inevitably move into an unfamiliar and complicated world to discover ourselves out there. The ambivalence of that departure—a heroic striving or an expulsion?—haunts Eliot’s poem of beginnings and ends, past and present, gains and losses. [Read more…]

Memoir as Eco-Farming Manifesto

December 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Janet Newman

This Farming Life: Five generations on a New Zealand farm by Tim Saunders (Allen & Unwin, 2020), 272pp, $36.99

Early each morning Tim Saunders magpies words and phrases from the notebook he carries around the farm for his poems, short stories and now a memoir, he told a Manawatū Writers’ Festival session at Feilding Library in September this year. Audience members seemed more interested in his farming than his writing process, however. ‘Is lambing over now?’ asked one. Ditto on Saunders’ August Radio New Zealand interview with Kim Hill. ‘Bollocks!’ responded one listener to his explanation that lambing starts in cold weather so that lambs are weaned onto spring grass to improve their health later on: ‘They lamb now so that we can have spring lamb on our table for Christmas.’ ‘Well,’ replied Saunders, ‘I think that might be one of the reasons for some people, but for me, I think more in terms of animal health myself.’ [Read more…]

My Brilliant Career

September 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

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…]

Devastating Losses and Creative Reparation

August 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Penelope Todd

Paper Nautilus: A trilogy by Michael Jackson (Otago University Press, 2019), 272pp., $35

‘I create so I can leave some trace of my existence.’ So wrote master watercolourist Xu Min. I open this review with a quotation from one of the author’s exemplars, since Michael Jackson argues that we are indistinct in ourselves, and more or less created from interactions with our ‘significant others’.

For an author with an avowedly nebulous sense of self, Michael Jackson has produced an impressively concrete body of work. An internationally renowned anthropologist, he has published more than thirty volumes of poetry, ethnography, fiction and memoir. With The Paper Nautilus he has wavered and created a threefold hybrid. The nautilus—paper-thin egg-case of the pelagic octopus—might represent the fragile self or the book covers themselves, inviting the question of whether the life or the pages can safeguard all they are asked to contain. The book, as Jackson writes, ‘begins discursively with … loosely connected essays and gradually morphs into a memoir of a marriage and a friendship, only to be reinvented as a work of fiction’ (p.12). [Read more…]