Emma Gattey

Every morning, so far, I’m alive: A memoir by Wendy Parkins (Otago University Press, 2019), 216 pp., $35

Straddling the fraught realms of personal and familial history, diagnosis of mental illness and rehabilitation, restorative nature writing, travelogue and philosophy, this memoir doesn’t pick its battles. It tackles what might be the most consuming issue of human life: whether or not to continue at all. And it emerges triumphant. At its core, Wendy Parkins’ latest work is an act of self-help (and I use this term here in no pejorative sense), an epistemological performance, the living-through of philosophy. As readers, we join Parkins as she thinks through the meaning of life, answering the stark ultimatum posed by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.’ Camus is in fact one of the few famous suicide-philosophers whom Parkins does not cite or posthumously spar with or respond to. Nevertheless, this ur-question of philosophy looms large over this book. [Read more…]

Ruth Brown

From Cairo to Cassino: A memoir of Paddy Costello by Dan Davin, ed. Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, 2019) 94 pp., $25

When Clive Reading says he’s planning to kill himself, his fellow officer feels sorry for him but can’t help thinking he could do worse. For Reading has broken the sacred code that binds men together in time of war – he has deserted his men on the eve of battle: ‘Cleared out. Ratted. Buggered off. Said he had to report back to battalion.’

These men are characters in Dan Davin’s short story ‘Coming and Going’ in Breathing Spaces (1975), and the ethos that underpins the story also shapes Davin’s memoir of Paddy Costello. [Read more…]