memoir – Page 11

Cautiously Searching for Ancestors

April 1, 2014 Leave a Comment

Chris Else
Migrations, by Rod Edmond, (Bridget Williams Books, 2013), 248 pp., $39.99

History begins where memory ends, although the line between the two is blurred: other people’s memories – parents’ and grandparents’, for example – are as much our personal experiences as our own; and the artificial construction of the past from the historical record is not always a public matter. Many people feel the need to push beyond the now and seek their roots not just in a culture or a place but in the lives of individuals – their ancestors. I find this puzzling. I know little about my own family history and have never been disposed, beyond a lukewarm curiosity, to find out. Looking back down the lines of inheritance seems to me an odd way of arriving at any truth about myself. How far would I go? Three generations brings fourteen people into the story; another three takes the total to 126. Do I explore them all or do I select from amongst them? And if I do select, how do I choose? The choice between bloodlines seems almost as arbitrary as self-invention, for which I would need no painstaking research. [Read more…]

Found Under a Cabbage Leaf

April 1, 2014 Leave a Comment

Brian Clearkin
A History of Silence, by Lloyd Jones (Penguin, 2013), 273 pp., $38

From the first lines of the first page, Jones draws you into his finely sketched world. Scattered throughout the present are links and clues to his past. His apartment occupies the old shoe factory, which manufactured his childhood shoes. A book, gifted to his father with a flyleaf inscription from his mother, expresses more love between them than he ever observed in his family years. Through his childhood eyes we glimpse the inaccessible Spartan starkness of their motel-like twin bedroom home.

Slowly the past is brought into the picture, from childhood recollections to musing on how Captain James Cook’s artist William Hodges civilised and Anglicised the eighteenth-century antipodean wilderness landscapes he captured on canvas. As the jigsaw pieces of his world are turned over and fitted together, we glimpse the decidedly inauspicious beginnings of his parents’ lives – one as an orphan, the other given up for adoption at age four.

Jones and his siblings grow up in a New Zealand that survives now, surely, as little more than a fading memory for him and his fellow baby-boomers. [Read more…]

Woman with a Rolleiflex Camera

March 1, 2014 Leave a Comment

Sally Blundell
Self-Portrait, by Marti Friedlander with Hugo Manson, (Auckland University Press, 2013) 264 pp., $59.99

‘I don’t mind explaining [my work],’ writes Marti Friedlander at the end of her autobiography Self-Portrait. ‘But I also don’t want people to know too much. Even now, writing this book, I wonder if I’m giving too much away. It’s a self-protection thing. You are vulnerable. It’s matter of where you place the barrier.’ Now entering her 86th year, Friedlander, the very private person behind many of New Zealand’s most well-known photographs, is clear about where that barrier should be.

She was born, we are told, Martha Gordon in Bethnal Green, London, on 19 February 1928, one of two daughters of Jewish refugee parents (‘as far as I know, from Kiev in Russia’). Any more about her parents: ‘I don’t want to talk about them further, because I value them too much. I want anything I say about them to be a validation rather than anything else.’ [Read more…]

Thread Caught on the Thorn of a Minute

March 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Paula Morris

Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Mary Edmond-Paul, (Otago University Press, 2012) 327 pp., $40.

The Lodge, a big wooden house on the edge of Mt Albert, Auckland is a landmark I’ve passed hundreds of times; my sister lives nearby. It was once part of the mental hospital that, growing up, I knew as Carrington. For years I had a vague notion of the building’s one-time role as a place of rest and recovery, but I didn’t realise how important a place it was to the life and work of Robin Hyde. In the mid 1930s, the Lodge was to prove a sanctuary where Hyde was given the time and physical space to read and to write – including two substantial pieces, a 1934 autobiography, and a 1935 journal, published in their entirety for the first time here in Your Unselfish Kindness.

Hyde — born Iris Wilkinson in 1906 — arrived at the Lodge in the winter of 1933, after the second major breakdown in her life had culminated in a suicide attempt in the Waitemata Harbour. She’d been plucked from the sea and arrested, incarcerated in a bleak cell in Auckland Hospital that usually housed binge-drinkers. Hyde was a voluntary patient at the Lodge, her first visit lasting only a month before expulsion to the main hospital after getting caught trying to smuggle in morphine.

But by the end of 1933 Hyde was back there, under the benevolent care of psychiatrists Dr Henry Buchanan and — most crucially — Dr Gilbert Tothill, and lived at the Lodge off and on for almost four years. Her final departure was early in 1937, after Tothill had moved on and Hyde had lost her main confidante and protector. During her time at the Lodge, Hyde managed to secure a room of her own — first a bedroom, later an attic study where the clatter of her typewriter wouldn’t disturb anyone.

[Read more…]

A Kind of Belonging

October 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Touchstones: Memories of People and Place, by James McNeish (Random House, 2012), 295 pp., $30.

The publicity material and preliminaries of James McNeish’s recent book Touchstones hedge about its origins and purpose. He is the reluctant author, according to an interview in the New Zealand Herald (August 1, 2012). The book is the idea of other people, namely his publisher and his wife; he, in fact does not like ‘writing about myself’.

McNeish is not writing ‘orthodox memoirs’, only ‘a relevant character sketch’ of himself, he states in his Author’s Note. An epigraph borrowed from Mark Twain warns the reader not to expect any motive, moral or plot. On the following page is a dictionary definition of ‘Touchstone’ as ‘Criterion. A standard of judgement’.

McNeish traces in Part One, which is entitled ‘People’, the intellectual and emotional education he gained in his early career from contact with nine people, each of their names the title of a chapter. These mentors are presented in snapshots, their presence brief and sometimes fragmentary. Some of these reminiscences are memorable, but quite often there is a sense the author is straining for significance. The pattern manufactured from a compound called ‘touchstone’ is stamped upon the raw material of a memoir.

[Read more…]

Brandishing a Paintbrush

October 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Raewyn Alexander

Before I Forget, by Jacqueline Fahey (Auckland University Press, 2012), 192 pp, $45 .

Venturing into often extremely private territory with honesty and insight, this memoir’s a remarkable read. Fahey’s stunning cover is a painting that suggests the older artist looking back: her younger self’s presented in a little black dress with high heels, with younger self yelling ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t’, (as if the older woman can never truly understand the past, not now). We make of memory what we may, crafting rather than recreating the actuality of lived experience, and Fahey illustrates this very well, giving the sense of a mature artist who mines the past for necessary information to unfold the stories she wants to tell and explore. Areas of darkness surround this sense of recall: in the cover image, a dog and an infant perhaps stand for traumatic events. Yet the interpretation of tumultuous life events persists, and the perplexities of returning to her past are carried out with aplomb. This is brave, admirably clear prose, written with wit and containing many surprises – a memoir with various layers and subtle meanings.

[Read more…]