2014: My Year of Reading

2014 was the year I discovered GoodReads, and now I can’t imagine how I was keeping track of my reading without it. In fact, I don’t think I was at all. Last year’s list of the books I read was compiled from memory, but I don’t think my mind can encompass that this year. According to GoodReads (bless ‘em) I read 71 books, which is 9 more than last year. 

I read and reviewed slightly fewer books for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (read 42 and reviewed 10 in 2014, as opposed to reading 43 and reviewing 14 in 2013), but I also increased the time I gave to the Challenge by organising guests authors, giveaways and interviews (more of this in a soon-to-be posted post on my year of writing). Given my hectic schedule, I’m aiming to read and review roughly the same number this year, but I’m also signing up to the 2015 South Asian Women Writers Challenge. This was prompted by a Twitter conversation with a lady who pointed out that there was only one woman on a list of 10 award-winning books by Asian writers which I had re-posted in my feed, and I realised my own ignorance about our neighbouring women writers.

The standout book for my year was Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, a story about a woman brutalised in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Malaysia, who, once she’s free, creates a Japanese garden as an act of penance. The writing was crisp and restrained, the story symbolic and suspenseful. The setting, in the Cameron highlands of Malaysia, was familiar, as we holidayed there when I turned 14 (another overseas birthday, this one in a hotel in Malacca with a cake from a bakery), but richly detailed.

Close on the heels of this was Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, which I loved for its sensuality, and also because I’d read nothing like it before. And Kristell Thornell’s Night Street about artist Clarice Beckett (although I read it in 2013, I reviewed it last year), which was a poignant, moving book.

Other fantastic reads (in no order) were Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch for its dense and luscious prose; Diane Cook’s uneasy, dystopian stories in Man V. Nature; Nicola Griffith’s Hild, a lengthy historical fiction novel about a smart and perceptive girl who used her brains for power in a Christianising England; Donna McDonald’s indispensable memoir The Art of Being Deaf; Nike Sulway’s speculative fiction novel Rupetta for its originality and sadness; the quiet, contained and peculiar Traitor by Stephen Daisley, about an old New Zealand soldier; Inga Simpson’s tender Mr Wigg, which had a slow and cumulative power; Barbara Kingsolver’s climate change novel Flight Behaviour which every man, woman & household pet should read; and Andrew McGahan’s novels Wonders of a Godless World and Underground. McGahan is the kind of novelist I aspire to be: he’s not afraid to try new genres, and each time he does so masterfully. 

Below is the complete list of my the books I read, more for my own records than for the assumption that anyone will be interested (!)

Australian Women Writers Challenge – books reviewed

1.    Heat and Light, Ellen Van Neerven 

2.    Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance, Michelle Dicinoski

3.    The First Week, Margaret Merrilees

4.    Snake, Kate Jennings

5.    The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir, Donna McDonald

6.    Rupetta, Nike Sulway

7.    Thornwood House, Anna Romer

8.    Kayang and Me, Kim Scott    

9.    The Singing Gold, Dorothy Cottrell

10. Night Street, Kristel Thornell (read in 2013)

Australian Women Writers Challenge – books read

11.    The Women in Black, Madeleine St. John

12.    Foreign Soil, Maxine Beneba Clarke

13.    The Etched City, K.J. Bishop

14.    Resurrection, P.A. McDermott

15.    Beams Falling, P.M. Newton

16.    A Kindness Cup, Thea Astley

17.    Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Jane Rawson

18.I for Isobel, Amy Witting

19.    Amy's Children, Olga Masters

20.Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams

21.    The Ark, Annabel Smith

22.Madness: a Memoir, Kate  Richards

23.All the Birds, Singing, Evie Wyld

24.When the Night Comes, Favel Parrett

25.The Good Daughter, Honey Brown

26.Red Queen, Honey Brown

27.Darkness on the Edge of Town, Jessie Cole

28.Nest, Inga Simpson

29.The Seal Woman, Beverley Farmer

30.The Disappearance of Ember Crow, Ambelin Kwaymullina

31. The Great Unknown, Angela Meyer

32.Anguli Ma, a Gothic Tale, Chi Vu

33.The Romance of a Station, Rosa Praed

34.Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung

35.Camera Obscura, Kathryn Lomer

36.The Bride Price, Cat Sparks

37.An Australian Heroine, R Murray Prior

38.The Watch Tower, Elizabeth Harrower

39.The Swan Book, Alexis Wright

40.Mr Wigg, Inga Simpson

41. Policy and Passion, Rosa Praed

42.My Beautiful Enemy, Cory Taylor

43.Red Dirt Talking, Jacqueline Wright

Other Australian books:

44.To Name Those Lost, Rohan Wilson

45.Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas

46.Traitor, Stephen Daisley

47.The Weaver Fish, Robert Edeson

48.Over the Water, William  Lane

49.The Tribe, Michael Mohammed Ahmad

50.Wonders of a Godless World, Andrew McGahan

51. Underground, Andrew McGahan

52.The Roving Party, Rohan Wilson

53.The Local Wildlife, Robert Drewe

Other international books:

54.We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

55.The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

56.Watership Down, Richard Adams

57.Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves, James Nestor

58.The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

59.Man V. Nature: Stories, Diane Cook

60.Hild, Nicola Griffith

61. How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran

62.Nora Webster, Colm Toibin

63.Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

64.The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

65.Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

66.Don't Cry, Mary Gaitskill

67.Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

68.Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Julie Maroh

69.The Lover, Marguerite Duras

70.The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd

71.  My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell

72.The Garden of Evening Mists, Twan Eng Tan

Review of Heat and Light

I first encountered Ellen van Neerven’s writing at a salon even at Avid Reader in 2013. I often find readings hard because they require so much energy, first to listen and then to imagine, but Ellen’s gripped me. There was (if I heard her correctly) water, a boat, and a woman.

This too, was the image that persisted after I’d closed the appealing covers of her collection of stories, Heat and Light, although on this occasion it wasn’t quite a woman rising from the water, which, incidentally, this is the title of the middle section of this work.

In ‘Water,’ Australia has become a republic and Aboriginal culture is paramount, encouraged and facilitated by the president, Tanya Sparkle. Aboriginal spirituality ‘is on its way to becoming the most popular religion,’ Jessica Mauboy’s song ‘Gotcha’ has become the national anthem, Aboriginal art has become commodified and the national flag ‘is a horrible mash-up job of the old flag and both the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag. It looks like Tanya Sparkle’s seven-year-old son did it in Paint’ (73). The president has also created a ‘super country’ for Aboriginal people from the twenty or so islands off Moreton Bay. The application criteria is ‘to show how they have been removed or disconnected from their county — priority given to those who don’t even know where they’ve come from’ (74) – a reference to the obligation in current native title law to provide proof of unbroken descent to country. 

However, these islands are inhabited by plantpeople, who are plants with sentience, and they need to be evicted before Aboriginal people can live there. The narrator Kaden is curious about them, and ‘can’t get over how much they look like us’ (84) but is also cautious about their difference: ‘You should see the way they walk through water. Their heads like a tangling piece of reed. And you’ll look closer and see their shoulders swing back and forth like some smooth stroke and it’s frightening’ (89). Larapinta is the one with whom Kaden engages most. She consumes information through her e-reader, from encyclopaedias to Mills & Boon, and acts as a mechanism by which Kaden, and therefore the reader, can question notions of identity, belonging, alienation, the abuse of our natural environment, and how we treat others, human and non-human.

The reason for Kaden’s sardonic overtones in describing this new world for Aborigines becomes clear by the story’s end. The politics reminded me of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, in which Warren Finch’s role as international claimant for peace is undermined by Wright’s bitter humour. The tone in both books serves as a reminder of the disastrous effects of government intervention.

I loved the power at the end of this work; indeed I adored the whole story – it was different, beautifully written, and suffused with a gorgeous wonder for and appreciation of the natural world.

The format of Heat and Light isn’t straightforward, with ‘Heat’ being a collection of stories with linked characters, ‘Water’ being almost a novella, and ‘Light’ having disparate stories. I found it unsettling because my expectations of genre were disrupted, but I also liked that, because it forced me to think and wonder why I’d needed a neat series of stories, or a full-blown novel, at all. Sue of Whispering Gums made a comment about Indigenous literature in the context of Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air, positing that it was stories and their themes, rather than narrative force, that pulled that particular book together, and I think that might also be happening here. After all, it shouldn’t make much difference, for stories tell us who we are, and nourish us and keep us alive, as they do in the marvellously surreal town in ‘Currency,’ where stories are used as barter.

In all of the stories, it’s detail that makes the work spring to life, such as when a newborn, held in an aunt’s arms, ‘made a sound that imprinted on her’ (50). It’s also the dynamics between characters. In ‘Anything Can Happen’, the narrator’s girlfriend Lucy wants to pick her up after having her wisdom teeth out, but her mother weighs in: ‘Lucy’s normally sweet face looked then like a run-over pie. I remembered Mum had made the same face when she commented on my new laptop bag and I said Lucy had made it for me for my birthday. They were both fighting not to be obsolete’ (146). On that note, another beautiful and often elemental part of the stories is that attraction between and desire of women. It’s sensual, quietly uncontrollable, and a bit magical: ‘I sat on the toilet seat and looked down between my legs, amazed at the glistening wet mark on my underwear, like glitter’ (138). 

There are also sudden and frequent shifts from the huge and intangible to the small and particular. Mental illness and love – concepts which are often abstract and hard to get a grip on - are suddenly pulled into reality at the ending of the last story, ‘Sound’, when they cause the narrator’s brother to act in a horrifying way. Be warned: the final page stabs you in the heart.

In his acceptance speech for the Prime Minister’s literary awards, shambolic though they, were Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, generously donated his prize money of $40,000 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. His reasoning was thus:

‘I hope it might perhaps grow a few things. My mortgage will go on as mortgages do, but if one of those books helps a few children to advance beyond the most basic literacy to one that is liberating, then I will consider the money better spent.

And if just one of those children in turn becomes a writer, if just one brings to Australia and to the world an idea of the universe that arises out of that glorious lineage of 60,000 years of Australian civilisation, then I will think this prize has rewarded not just me, but us all.’

Heat and Light is fresh, innovative and engaging, and it made my brain tingle with all the questions it didn’t answer. I’m a bit desperate to read Ellen’s next work, and was delighted to hear that she’d received a grant Queensland Writers Fellowship for 2015. Funding for talent is badly needed in Australia, not least because we need new narratives to resists the false, leaden and sometime outright ridiculous stories that our government would like us to believe. Books like Ellen’s, that open with a strong Aboriginal woman who ‘wore a red floral dress that dropped off her narrow shoulders’ (4), shimmer with stories that show us a different way to live.

I’m leaving a copy of this book in the studio in Rome for other writers to read, but really, every woman, man and their dogs should be buying it.

Book details: Van Neerven, Ellen. Heat and Light. Brisbane: UQP, 2014.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 10th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.  

Review of The First Week

Margaret Merrilees’ debut novel, The First Week, had something of the complexity which I was looking for in Snake. It deals with the question of what Europeans have done to the land since settlement, and contemplates what we are to do with that legacy.

It opens with the widowed protagonist, Marian, wandering about the farm in Western Australia that she and her husband have worked. She stops at its border. The land on the other side has been returned to Noongars, but it’s poor quality, the soil having been eroded. Due to clearing, there also aren’t enough trees and shrubs to absorb the rising table water below the surface, which means that the water is bringing salt (which naturally occurs in the soil) with it. The salt makes it hard for vegetation to grow, and so the cycle continues. The implication is that, once Europeans have used up, the land, it’s given back to the original custodians, because the Europeans have no use for it any more. They might see it as trash, but Aboriginal people know that it never is.

Marian’s suspicion of Noongars, and her contemplation of how they could possibly use the land given that it’s so worn out, is soon thrust into sharp relief by a crime committed by her son. She goes to Perth to visit him, and becomes acquainted with his next-door-neighbour, an Aboriginal woman, Lee, whose family had to live on the reserve in the town near her farm. 

What I liked most about this work was the convincing depiction of Marian’s bewildered encounters with the city and its terrifying freeways and trains, her son’s friends and their ideas, and with Lee, with whom her engagement can only occur because she’s desperate to understand her son and his crime. Much of the beginning takes place while she’s in a state of shock and confusion, and this state splits her open and forces us to rethink her approach to things as she puts herself back together. However, it also makes her vulnerable, and the reader cares about what happens to her on account of this.

As Marian’s week progresses, she gets to know Lee better. Shut up and listen, Lee tells her (150), and eventually Marian does, and reconsiders her attitudes. By the end of the novel, she’s (metaphorically) back at the fence, trying to work out what to do with her farm and that border between her and her Noongar neighbours. I found it interesting that the choices she mulled over mirrored those taken by my protagonist in Entitlement.

Salt bubbles up frequently in the work, a reminder that the bad history never stays underground, but wells up, poisonous, and needs to be treated. One of the most striking references to it comes when Marian recalls a holiday by the river at her mother’s with her sons. She jumps into the water ‘and laughed with the sheer pleasure of it and duck-dived. But something was wrong. The taste of the water on her lips was wrong. The water was brackish, where no salt should be … This was a river. [Her boys] saw nothing wrong, would never know that a river should smell of reeds and mud and fresh sweet water. They were the salt generation’ (135). The metaphor is poignant because the salt water didn’t cause problems until deforestation by Europeans, and younger generations are the ones that must deal with this legacy. Although on an ecological level, this problem is a global one, not just confined to Australia. 

I found out about this book through a post by Sue of Whispering Gums about an essay Merrilees had penned on white people writing Aboriginal characters. Merrillees rightly points out, as I indicated in my review of Snake, that one cannot refer to Australia without including an Indigenous consciousness. How to do this, however, is contested. She notes that there’s ‘never going to be a unified Aboriginal view, any more that there is a unified white view. There is no such entity as “the Aboriginal people” to provide answers.

The best thing we can do, she suggests, is to take her character Lee’s advice and ‘Shut up and listen.’ On that note, you can also listen to Melissa Lucashenko’s talk on representations of Indigenous people in her 2013 Colin Simpson Memorial Lecture, while Anita Heiss answered some interview questions for the Wheeler Centre on a workshop she gave on this topic, now available on her website.

The politics of writing Indigenous characters and voices is something I think about repeatedly, even having written a book which does so. I suspect my approach was flawed – the more I read Indigenous literature and about Indigenous people the more I question some of the decisions I made – but I think Sue is on the money when she says writes, ‘Genuine, thoughtful trial-and-error seems to be the way to go. Listen, give it a go, and listen again.’ 

Book details: Merrilees, Margaret. The First Week. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2013.

Borrowed as an eBook from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 9th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Snake

Kate Jennings’ novella has periodically appeared on my radar for the last few years, particularly as I came across the anthology of poems she edited Mother, I’m Rooted (what an great and unforgettable title!) in my feminist readings at uni. Snake is also a poetic work, with chapters (collected under four parts) so brief they veer towards prose-poems. 

It opens with the character of Rex, a man who cannot inherit his family’s farm because it is needed for his brother. His lonely life is narrated through the second person, which served to keep the reader at a distance from Rex, just as his family does.

Part Two opens with Rex’s marriage after WWII to a woman named Irene, and a section which captures Irene’s personality in a few brief lines: ‘Billie was noticing how Irene, in her excitement, kept forgetting herself. She’d break into a stride, causing the silk of her wedding dress to pull tight across her thighs. Thus checked, she reverted to smaller, more ladylike steps. The next minute, though, her gait widened, and she was off again’ (21). Who knew a piece of fabric could do so much? It acts as a template for much of Irene’s behaviour in the rest of the work.

In Part Two, the reader is still held at length through different perspectives on Irene, from her bridesmaid Billie, sister Daphne, her parents and parents-in-law, from Rex and then finally herself, but mediated through third person.  Part Three is also in third person, narrating Rex and Irene’s relationship to the plot of land they have settled upon: Rex loves it because it has irrigation and is full of water, while Irene established a flourishing garden. However, her lack of stimulation festers into discontent with, and finally hatred at, Rex. She could ‘go for days without speaking … Then, in the bedroom, the children asleep, she unknitted her lips and words poured from her, black as pitch’ (42). Despite this bitterness and her infelicities, Rex decides to stay with her.

They have two children, Boy, whom Irene adores, and Girlie, who irritates her. Irene finds a job in town and some off-beat friends, some of whom Rex doesn’t take to. However, just as Rex cannot understand Irene, neither does she understand her husband. After various natural calamities on the farm, Irene blithely comments ‘The insurance will pay’ and Rex ‘looked at his wife, baffled anew by her insensitivity. Of course the insurance will pay. That wasn’t the point; his work was shredded’ (96). Farming is never just farming, but artistry as well, albeit in a country not designed for it.

In the final, brief section, the voice reverts to second person from Irene’s point of view, closing with her question to Boy, ‘Where did the years go?’ in a tone that ‘isn’t plaintive, as might be expected, but querulous and accusing, as if you had no part in it, as if someone stole the years from under your nose’ (137). It’s a bitter ending to a bleak book whose characters are constrained by a conservative society and an environment, both physical and emotional, to which they are unsuited.

Snakes writhe throughout the book. Boy attacks one with an axe, Girlie is terrified of them, Irene watches out for them while hunting for wild asparagus, and Rex decapitates them in the irrigation channels with a shovel and ease. Essentially they act to reinforce the characters: Irene’s biting of her husband, Boy’s adventurousness and Girl’s timorousness, and Rex’s adroitness as a farmer.

Having grown up in the country, the characters, settings and snakes were familiar to me. I know of those such as Rex’s parents who thought that ‘people who spoke in consecutive sentences were indulging themselves; they were of the same order as tipplers and gluttons. Remarks beyond  those necessary to get things done passed their lips are rarely as cacti have flowers, and were as startling’ (16). Likewise I know people like Rex, who was simple and wanted stillness and nature, and Irene, who was a fast women who wanted dalliance and dash, and was cramped by the country. And maybe this is why, despite its beautiful language and a carefully crafted sentences, the book didn’t do much for me. Perhaps if it was longer and the characters had more complexity, I would have enjoyed it more. 

Also, I can’t read a book about the country now without thinking about Indigenous people. There were none on these pages, except in their absence. At a conference in Prato earlier this year, an academic from Germany told me about her PhD student who was researching Australian novels in the wake of Mabo, and found that they were describing the landscape in a completely different way, obviously with more consideration for Indigenous issues. And of course, there are more and more Indigenous authors being published which also influences the way we look at land and its history. Perhaps my problem with the novella was simply that it was dated.

Book details: Jennings, Kate. Snake. Collingwood: Black, Inc., 2011.

Borrowed as an eBook from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 8th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge

Review of The Art of Being Deaf

Earlier this year in April, on a balmy autumnal Brisbane evening (is there any other kind?), I put on one of my Leona Edmiston frocks and caught the bus to my beloved Avid Reader bookshop in West End.  This time the occasion was the launch of Donna McDonald’s memoir The Art of Being Deaf. 

When I moved to Brisbane from London and found a job, my boss urged me to get in touch with Donna, with whom she’d once worked. Donna had been deaf from birth, but her lipreading skills, my boss said, were incredible. In 2010 I met Donna over coffee at the University of Queensland, where she was writing her PhD. Although I had been reading about the history of deafness and the education of deaf people for my PhD, that coffee with Donna was responsible for the intensification of my interest in how writers represented deafness, and my own identity as a deaf writer. I read a version of her exegesis and creative piece, which later found publication through Gallaudet University Press and thus was being launched at Avid.

This launch was quite different to others I’d attended, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been. There were two interpreters – one who translated the signing of Bretty Casey (Deaf Services Queensland CEO), into speech (and the translator didn’t just speak, but captured the cadences and nuances of his expression), and one who translated speech into sign language. Krissy, the events coordinater, joked that she wanted a sign language interpreter for the launch of her next erotic novel (let’s hope that comes to pass!) The work was then introduced by the ever-lovely Kris Olsson, and it was beautiful to see Donna’s friends, whom she mentions in her work, sitting in the front row.

The prologue of The Art of Being Deaf opens with the three-year old Donna removing her new hearing aid with a particularly BrisVegas flourish on the William Jolley Bridge, leaving ‘white clouds of softness falling into my ears’ (x). This gesture acts as a motif for the rest of the book, in which Donna explores and resists the efforts of others to have her conform to their vision of what a deaf person should be like. Which, in essence, is like a hearing person.

The prologue also introduces the reader to Donna’s mother, a strong-willed woman who was determined that her daughter would succeed at all costs. Rather than having Donna learn sign language (which is easier and more natural for deaf people than speech), she sent her daughter, age 3, to a school which taught her lipreading and how to speak. Five years later, Donna was transferred to a private girls’ school. She went on to a successful career in the public sector in England and Australia, worked as a freelance policy analyst, and now teaches at a university. Donna’s and her mother’s perseverance certainly paid off, but it wasn’t without cost. 

Donna’s exploration of the impact of deafness upon her identity was prompted by a visit to a psychologist who stated, with a question, ‘Your hearing loss must have had a big impact on you?’ She didn’t respond to the question at the time, but as she began to think about her past, she wondered about the impact of her removal from the deaf school. Her mother, she writes, ‘had been vigilant and successful in her determination to raise me as a full-fledged hearing person’, a vigilance in ‘keeping me apart from the deaf world [that] had bordered on inflexible’ (62). Yet Donna was deaf, and a part of her history was missing. She began to get in touch with her friends from the deaf school and, her antennae now up, she also realised ‘how rarely I had met deaf characters in novels’ (63). She set about finding some more literary people by trawling the stacks at the university library.

Her reading was a depressing exercise, as she explains: ‘The publishers’ blurbs and abstracts revealed a tendency by most “expert” writers to portray deafness as a melancholy condition, or as a subject of caricature, or as a problem to be understood, overcome, or resolved … The language used in so many titles of books, essays, videos, and other documents on deafness emphasised an “otherness” experienced by deaf people that is apparently bleak, hopeless, and lonely’ (64). She switched genres, hoping for a better response from memoirists, but this was no better. Their rendition of deafness as something traumatic was completely alien to her own experiences. Eventually, she began reading novels about deaf characters, and was heartened, although the pickings were slim and the authors themselves were not always deaf. Neither Vikram Seth, (An Equal Music), Frances Itani (Deafening) and T. Coraghessan Boyle (Talk Talk) were deaf, but ‘they were able to imagine their way, with reasonable credibility, into deaf experiences’ (68).

It’s significant that Donna’s journey was conducted through literature. In a paper given at a conference, she said, ‘Stories of deafness have to travel out beyond disability and medicine into the world of novels and films. We learn about who we are as much by what we read and see about ourselves, as by what we are told and by what we experience’ (102). Until deaf people can view or read positive representations of themselves, deafness will often be considered to be a curse rather than a unique experience. The same holds for many other minorities, including Indigenous people. 

Donna mentioned this finding to me during our coffee at the university, and it compelled me to begin actively writing about the positive aspects of deafness. Although at the time I told her (and she recounts this conversation in her book) that I felt as though I would be cheating if I wrote about deafness (largely because I couldn’t see how it would challenge me as a writer), I’ve since realised how important it is to tell good stories about deaf people. I’ve since published an essay on the creativity inherent in my experience of deafness, and used the ambiguity of hearing in a short story published in the Review of Australian Fiction.

The act of writing, and particularly the act of writing memoir, is a way of creating a map of one’s life, but Donna was specific about what kind of map she created. This was no narrative about ‘triumph over adversity’, for her deafness had not caused her any great adversity. Nor was it an account in which she wanted to dwell in misery (or ‘inspiration porn’, as the late Stella Young termed it). Rather, she drew her own, original map of the contours of her experiences of deafness, creating a land into which other people could travel and learn of its customs. 

At the book launch, Kris handed over to another wonderful Queensland writer, Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. In many ways, I’ve found through my reading, the experiences of deaf people who have been forced to speak are akin to those of Indigenous or any people who are colonised, for they have been removed from their own culture and assimilated into the dominant culture, and forced to speak its language. Melissa talked about the importance of elders in Aboriginal culture for educating children and showing them a way forward. Donna, she said, had not had any such elders in her deaf community, and had needed to work things out on her own. Unfortunately by this stage I was starting to mist up, for I recognised the loneliness she was talking about, and I missed the rest of her talk because I couldn’t lipread it. 

One of the important aspects of first hand accounts is that they demonstrate the diversity of the experiences of being deaf. The amount of hearing someone has, when they became deaf, and whether they were raised to speak or to sign all have an impact on how they interact with and respond to the world. This is why Donna’s memoir is so significant – it is another contribution to literature on deafness and, most importantly, it indicates that deafness is not, as David Lodge, author of Deaf Sentence, might have some believe, a death sentence. Unsurprisingly, every copy of her book sold at the launch at Avid that night.

It might seem incredible, but after some thirty years on this earth, Donna was the first deaf person with whom I had ever interacted at length. Until that coffee, I had felt myself to be an aberration, but when I met her then, and every other time we catch up, I am completely at ease in my own skin.  This is one of the best books I read in 2014. I hope you pick it up over the holidays and enjoy it as much as I have. Copies can be purchased here.

Book details: McDonald, Donna. The Art of Being Deaf: a Memoir. Gallaudet University Press, 2014.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 7th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.  

Review of Thornwood House

I can’t quite recall how I heard about Anna Romer’s Thornwood House; it may have been through a review for the Australian Women Writer’s challenge last year, which described it as ‘Australian rural Gothic’, a style I’m interested in writing.  At any rate, I left it on my desk when I went away for Christmas and, facing overdue library fines when I came back, figured I had better read it in a hurry. Then work and life got in the way, and only now am I getting to the review after a general clean up of my desktops – both wooden & computer.  My timing, however delayed, is apt, as it’s the National Week of Deaf People.

The story revolves around Audrey Kepler, who is bequeathed the homestead of Thornwood in Queensland when her estranged partner Tony dies, and moves there with her 11 year old daughter.  The house was owned by Tony’s grandfather, Samuel, who was accused of murdering his wife in 1946.  Audrey becomes obsessed with finding out the house’s history, and whether or not Samuel was innocent.  In doing so, she also uncovers the motivations behind Tony’s peculiar personality.

The novel turned out to be general fiction, which isn’t my cup of tea because the language doesn’t usually captivate me.  It didn’t here, either, not least because there were too many clichés.  About a third of the way in I was contemplating whether to give up (which I rarely do, because I know how involved it is to write these damn things, although Lionel Shriver begs to differ), when one of the male characters, Danny, turned out to be deaf.  I perked up immediately, because not only was he deaf, he was also hot, ‘in his mid-thirties; dark-haired, nicely muscled.  He wore only jeans: ragged at the cuffs, torn at the knees, low-slung beneath a tanned stomach’ (89).  

Danny signs, lipreads and uses a notebook for people who don’t know sign language.  Romer captures the discomfort hearing people sometimes feel when deaf people watch them intently to listen, and uses this to add to the sexual charge between Audrey and Danny: ‘It was disconcerting to have a man pay such close attention to my mouth, especially when I was talking’ (171). She also captures the beauty of sign language when she writes, ‘Danny made a lazy sign, knowing full well I couldn’t read it. His hands were large and lightly freckled, graceful’ (108). Danny refuses to speak because his voice sounds strange, but by the end of the novel there’s the suggestion that he’s about to counter this and start trying, which I liked. Although there is a long and troubled history of forcing the deaf to speak, in this instance it was used to show that Danny is accepting this part of himself, even though he is otherwise appealingly confident about his disability.

Donna McDonald, author of The Art of Being Deaf, has written about on literary representations of deaf people.  Often, such representations have been overwhelmingly negative, focussed not so much on how it’s possible to live in the world as a deaf person, but on how awful it is to lose one’s hearing.  Well, sure it’s difficult to be deaf, but you don’t need to have a pity party over it – life’s too short for that.  I have found it rewarding to be deaf – it has made me more attuned to other people, particularly minorities; it has made me more observant and I have become a far more interesting person than I might otherwise have been.  As I’ve noted in a guest post for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, I also almost certainly wouldn’t have been a writer if I wasn’t deaf.  

Which is why I was so pleased to see a positive portrayal of a deaf character in a book - it reflects the experiences of those who find deafness adds to their lives, rather than detracting.

Book details: Romer, Anna. Thornwood House. Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Borrowed from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 6th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge

Review of The Singing Gold

Over at the Australian Women Writers Challenge, where I’m a contributing editor in the area of diversity, I’ve been coordinating a focus on Australian Women Writers with Disability.

I was introduced to Dorothy Cottrell through fellow writer Michelle Dicinoski when I put out a call on Facebook for Australian women writers with disability to add to our list. Strangely enough, I’d just read an essay about Cottrell not two days before when I was looking for literature about far north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef.

Cottrell was a remarkable woman. She suffered from polio when she was small and was confined to a wheelchair. Her mother largely disowned her, so she was brought up by her aunt. She was also exceptionally talented and confident, taking lessons in sculpture and attending classes at the Royal Art Society. At 16 she returned to Ularunda in the outback to stay with her mother, where she learned how to handle a gun, and then eloped with the station’s bookkeeper, Walter Cottrell. They ended up on Dunk Island (north of Hichinbrook Island off the coast of Queensland), neighbours to the nature writer E.J. Banfield and his wife.

Cottrell’s perceptivity of the landscape is apparent in the beautiful descriptions in The Singing Gold (1928) her most famous work, which was published in book form in the UK and US, serialised in the Sydney Mail and drew praise from Mary Gilmore. The novel opens with the protagonist Joan rejecting a frilly doll, a gift from her grandmother. Joan is a tomboy who loves climbing trees and despises her brother for being much less clever than she is. She loves nature, however, and in a beautiful description of a flowering almond tree, Cottrell demonstrates Joan’s surprising jolt into adolescence and femininity:

After a while I rose from the grass, and climbed carefully into the heart of the tree . . . There was nothing now save sunfiltered, pale blossom, fresh and cool and marvellous, pressing against my bare brown legs and arms and neck, brushing my eyelids, crinkling against my lips.  I could not even see the sky, there was only the paleness, and the beauty, and the blossom, and a great buzzing of bees. It was like being in a fairy bath of flowers. (p. 51).

At the novel’s opening, Joan describes herself as ‘not the sort of little girl that harmonises with highly polished old furniture, ornament piled whatnots, and canaries in silk shaded cages’ (8). In climbing into the tree, however, the gentleness of the blossoms, the distinctive sensation of them ‘crinkling’ against her lips and the ‘fairy bath’ all combine to create in Joan a much softer appreciation of nature than formerly. I thought it a beautiful way of describing a girl’s growing sensuality.

One of the most striking passages in the book comes from a description of the novel’s title, from Joan’s father, who drove a flock of sheep across the plains as the sun went down:

And all day long a million larks fluttered singing into the sunshine, and the little cruel hawks of the plains followed the travelling sheep and preyed upon the living sparks of music. Singing they rose, although they knew that the hawks were waiting for them, singing even as they fled from the talons of death. For on the pitiless sun-bleached splendour of the downs there was no shelter for them, and so they rose singing by the hundred, and by the hundred were butchered … the sheep drifted slowly across the gold immensity of down, under the gold immensity of evening, and even the woolly backs were gold, and the rising larks and the hovering hawks so many sparks of fire (26-27).

In this passage there is a contrast, as in much Australian settler literature, between the beauty and harshness of the landscape and its inhabitants, but the overall impression is one of beauty. The rhythm of the phrases gradually builds, mirroring the sense that the sky is swelling with gold, which in turn contributes to the wonder of the passage. 

The novel is fairly autobiographical, following Joan’s marriage to a fellow named Clippings. As with Cottrell’s marriage to Walter, Clippings bought six wedding rings because he didn’t know what size his betrothed’s finger would be. In the church he dropped them on the floor and then ‘assisted by the tennis-playing young giants [who were witnesses] he crawled blushingly about the church and gathered up the rings.’

Clippings buys a island, to which the couple then repair, but one day while out in a boat, Joan’s food lands on an unidentified creature in the sea and she is struck with pain, perhaps mirroring Dorothy’s pain of polio. Clippings sells the island, the couple become destitute, and are saved when Joan sells some poems to a newspaper. Although the plot isn’t much to write home about, this novel still has gorgeous nature writing, a strong female protagonist, an that unavoidably heartening theme of gaining financial independence through writing. 

In real life, Cottrell became so successful as a writer that she jumped ship to America to avoid paying a huge tax bill in Australia. She’s a great example of a woman who wasn’t hampered by her disability. She spent most of her life in a wheelchair, was a crack shot with a rifle, lived on a Queensland island and makes buckets of money through writing: what’s not to love about that?

Book details: Cottrell, Dorothy. The Singing Gold. Hodder and Stoughton, 1928.

Read in the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

This is my 5th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Kayang and Me

I picked up this book after reading an excellent review of it by Marilyn of Me, You and Books for the Australian Women Writers Challenge last year. The more I read and re-read the work, the more intricate I found in it. 

The book is a dialogue between Indigenous author Kim Scott, and his female elder, or ‘kayang’, Hazel Brown, with whom Scott connected when he was searching for more information about his family, as he’d grown up knowing few Noongar people to whom he was related. He learned that his father was cousin to Hazel, who was raised in south west Western Australia.  Scott transcribed Hazel’s conversations with him, and added his own commentary about his relationships to his people and land.

Hazel was a straight-talker and pointed out injustice when she saw it, such as when she was told Aboriginal boys should be conscripted for the Vietnam war, and when she asked why, she was told, “Well, Australia’s your country.” She retorted, “What we own in Western Australia is not worth laying down our lives for. Most of us only got the reserve, and even then we haven’t got the title deeds for it. We don’t bloody well own it, so why go and fight for them?” (153). 

It’s only been in recent years that the efforts of Indigenous soldiers in the wars are finally finding recognition. Wesley Enoch’s play, Black Diggers for example, showed at the Sydney Festival earlier this year, and will also be on at the Brisbane Festival in September and October.

Perhaps the most harrowing aspect of the work was when Hazel’s small daughter was ill, but when she went to the surgery to get help, she was told by the doctor’s wife that he didn’t have surgery on Mondays. She went to the hospital, but was told that she couldn’t have the baby in the hospital without the doctor’s consent. She returned to the doctor’s house and saw him standing by the window, but was told by his wife that he was at golf. Hazel’s child died that night. She saw that he went to court, and he lost his job. In the street a few days later, he chipped her car in the street, and when she stepped out to confront him, he said, ‘I lost my job.’

That Hazel had to point out, ‘I lost a child. And lots of others did too,’ shows the incredible and nauseating want of empathy on the part of so many of the white people they moved among. 

However, Hazel did have positive relationships with some white people.  Although the government encouraged deforestation, which contributed to salinity, and which upset Hazel each time she had to pull out a mallee root, ‘many older Noongars are nostalgic about shearing and working on farms. Much of Kayang Hazel’s working life was spent as a rural labourer of one sort of another, and it was the same for most of her siblings and many of their children.  Her relationship with the land includes working it in a ‘white’ way, along with the friendships, memories, and respect she gained from doing so’ (226).

Scott’s comments and reflection on Hazel’s narrative are measured and his words were at times, I suspect, very carefully chosen.  I found his capacity to consider the nuances and imbrications of situations remarkable. For example, contemplating on the above abuse of the land by farmers, he writes that, ‘Maybe individual farmers can’t be held responsible: it was a time of ‘land settlement’ initiatives, with government policies promulgating such attitudes, encouraging such thinking. As the 2003 documentary, A Million Acres a Year, makes poignantly clear, farmers were damaged as well’ (225). He rarely allows anger to stain his writing, though he surely must have felt bitterness often, and shows a remarkable openness by showing his ‘insecurity, uncertainty and doubt’ (indeed this forms the title of one chapter). In doing so, the contrast with that closed up doctor couldn’t be more clear.

What I loved most about the work, aside from insights into the lives of Noongar people and Scott’s intelligent commentary, was the sound of Noongar language. The opening chapter is titled ‘Wilomin Noongar’, Wilomin being Hazel’s people, which sounds like a sweet rolled in one’s mouth.  Scott however writes that ‘Only a little Noongar language fits in this book, since it’s the sound that matters to me, and print does no justice to that’ (246). 

The tension between the traditionally oral language and its existence in print form is also raised at the beginning of the work, when Scott explains his attempts to keep the cadence of Hazel’s narration. This technique is explored more thoroughly in his most recent work, That Deadman Dance, in which the reader is pulled into the sound and sway of Indigenous language. 

This approach might arise from his positioning as a Noongar man with light skin (and his father was able to pass as a white man), who was not fully involved with his culture as a child, and who can see many different sides to a story.  In his keynote talk for the recent Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, and in this text, Scott referred to novelist Colin Johnson, or Mudrooroo, who believed that Indigenous people should marginalise white people in return, so that they could understand what it felt like. While understanding this polemical approach, Scott believes that it perpetuates and exacerbates the structural opposition between black and white, and doesn’t lead to a sustainable storytelling situation.

Rather, Scott cited Elizabeth Jolley to remind us that literature is ‘a place where people might meet and dwell.’  His writing, with its incorporation of Indigenous language, is like a hand extended, so that we might meet strong, Indigenous women such as Kayang Hazel.

As Marilyn notes in her review, this book is a fantastic way of learning about the complexities of the lives of Indigenous Australians.  Scott’s closing chapter, on regionalisms, is a timely reminder of the specificity of Indigenous experience, and that we need many more stories from Indigenous writers not only to understand their culture, but so that they can grow in confidence and strength after the battering of colonisation (which is continuing). I wrote in A Curious Intimacy, also set in south west WA, of the lanolin plant (sadly I don’t know its Indigenous name), which grows again after fire, and it seems to me that this is what is happening with Australia’s Indigenous people, and I believe that we can aid their growth by reading and engaging with their stories, thoughtfully and respectfully.

As with Marilyn, I’m including this post in my (lately shamefully neglected) reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which has held a focus on Indigenous women writers over July, and for Lisa Hill’s Indigenous Writers Week challenge, hosted in conjunction with NAIDOC week.

Book details: Scott, Kim and Hazel Brown.  Kayang & Me.  Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005.

Borrowed from the Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 4th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge. 

Review of Rupetta

Over at the Australian Women Writers Challenge, where I’m a contributing editor in the area of diversity, I’ve been coordinating a focus on lesbian/queer women writers over March, and this is why I’ve not really been posting here.  I asked a bunch of brilliant writers to pen some guest posts for me, and also put together a list of lesbian/queer Australian women writers.  In doing this, as so often happens when I write my roundups for reviews, I stumbled across a whole bunch of books I wanted to read.  One of these was Nike Sulway’s Rupetta, which I had come also across on Facebook, I think via spec fic writer James Bradley who mentioned it had won the 2013 James Tiptree Jnr. award for explorations of gender in science fiction or fantasy.  It has also been shortlisted for this year’s Aurelius Awards.

The narrative of Rupetta is split into two, with one strand told by Rupetta, ‘a woman  — not alive and not dead, not flesh and not bone.  A woman of copper and leather and steel.  A woman of porcelain and wood, of pipes and barrels and cogs and wheels’ (125).  Engineered in France in 1619, she forms intense relationships with Wynders, those who wind her heart.  The other, slightly more contemporary strand belongs to Henriette, who is desperate to become an Historian at Oban College and be Transformed, which means having a mechanical heart replace her own.

If I were to hazard a way of describing Rupetta, she’d be a 17th century cyborg, but this analogy still can’t encompass her humanity, for her heart and feelings are very much alive.  As noted on the James Tiptree Jr site, Rupetta is not ‘an android, a creature that is, etymologically, male. (The word is not gyndroid). Rupetta’s power does not come from her brain, but from her heart. Sulway has placed her construct not in the future, but the past, and made her female, created with traditionally feminine technology: sewing and weaving.’  The novel also retains an antique sensibility, with Oban College reminding me of Oxford, even though the area is named as Moreton Bay, with its ‘thick forests and slumping horizons’ (27).  

As a mixture of machine and human, Rupetta must be wound to stay animated, and the descriptions of this activity were startling in their sensuality.  When Elisabetta, her creator’s daughter, is left orphaned and must wynd Rupetta, Sulway writes:

I had thought she would need to ask me what to do; I had thought it would be a matter of guiding her fingers to the spot and helping her insert the key, opening the room inside me to reveal my four-chambered heart, but she needed no guidance.  She slipped her hand inside me and pressed her fingertips into the chambers, testing their texture and heat and weight.  She smiled, tilting her head to look at me, before she pushed her hand home, into my heart.  There was a sharp white pain and then silence; apple-green (26).

Read another way, that whiteness, then the apple-green, could easily be describing an orgasm.

The closeness between women is mirrored in the relationship between Henri and Miri, a woman at the college with whom she fall in love, and also between mothers and daughters and grandmothers and granddaughters - a heritage of affection that loops down over the centuries.  However there is also enmity and jealousy between women, which brings danger to Rupetta.

Rupetta lives forever, and once this becomes known, humans seek to appropriate her mechanics so that they, too, can become immortal through a Transformation.  With immortality, however, comes time, and with time comes the myths about Rupetta that build into a cult.  This is why the novel is also a story about history and how, in its telling, ‘Each truth … conceals another thousand left unspoken, unremembered’ (9).  At the centre of it however are the cogs of reality, ticking like Rupetta.

I loved the ambition of this work, the scope of its telling over so long a period, and the clever twining of strands at the end.  Sulway, assuming the reader’s intelligence and trusting us to remember details throughout the text, only resolves questions such as as those about the Oikos only just before the end.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been reading so many books that are the same lately, or if my reading is mirroring the turn my writing is taking, but some of the best things I’ve come across recently have been magic realism or speculative fiction, such as Merlinda Bobis’ The Fish Hair Woman and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.  Either way,  I’m glad that the AWW Challenge leads me astray from my usual fare and into intoxicating territory such as Sulway’s.  If you’d like to be similarly diverted, you should think about signing up!  

Book details: Sulway, Nike.  Rupetta.  Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2013.

Purchased as an ebook from Tartarus Press.

This is my 3rd review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge. 

Review of Ghost Wife

I first encountered Michelle one evening in late winter a few months after I had arrived in Brisbane in 2009.  It was at dinner on the verandah of a friend’s Queenslander in Auchenflower, and although Michelle wasn’t there, her American wife Heather was.  It was strawberry season, and the conversation tipped towards the cheapness and deliciousness of strawberries.

Her name came up again when I attended the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship ceremony in my long silk frock at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in 2012.  I had been shortlisted for the prose section and Michelle won the poetry section, but she wasn’t able to make it to Sydney because she was in Brisbane protesting against Campbell Newman’s liquidation (well, watering-down) of the civil partnership legislation for lesbian, gay and heterosexual couples to a ‘registration’, one of his many moves that have returned Queensland to a cultural backwater, along with his mean-spirited slashing of the Queensland Premier’s Literary awards and massive retrenchments which have depressed the local economy.  I’m hearing time and again how hard it is for people to find work at the moment, and many young creative people are leaving the state.

I didn’t meet Michelle until her launch of Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance at Avid Reader, and even then we didn’t have our first proper conversation until November last year over coffee at the State Library in Melbourne.  We had several things in common: we’re both struggling up that steep and rocky incline towards Established Writer status; we love academia but are sometimes not sure about it; we’re occasionally stressed out by trying to survive on part-time jobs while writing.  That aside, I also liked her directness, intelligence and obvious curiosity about the world and its impact on society (you can read her wonderful essay on Detroit’s abandoned buildings at Meanjin online).  I don’t have many writing friends, and I was glad that she became mine.

Ghost Wife details Michelle and Heather’s journey to Canada to get married, as their respective countries, Australia and America, didn’t – and still don’t – allow same sex marriage.  Australia also changed the Marriage Act in 2004 to specify that marriage was between a man and a woman, when previously it hadn’t mentioned gender at all.  The problem with this, as Michelle notes, is that it creates invisibility: 

The more difficult a government makes it to record our relationships, the easier it becomes for people to say, now and in the future, that these relationships didn’t or don’t exist.  The more invisible you make something, the harder it is to prove that it matters.  So much queer history has been lost, and so much is disputed.  So much is concealed behind tales of spinster aunts, playboy bachelors, life-long friendships.  We inherit a history of meaningful silences and notable absences.  And I was sick of it. (9)

Michelle and Heather’s response was to ‘make our own kind of noise, find our own kind of visibility’ (10), and she wrote this memoir as a testament to their relationship.  In crisp and often funny prose, she takes the reader to Newburyport where some of Heather’s family lived, then up to Toronto for the wedding, all the while dipping back into her own family’s history, and into the histories of other lesbians in Australia and America.

There was a striking contrast between the warmth and acceptance of Heather’s family and the thin-lipped conservatism of Michelle’s, who lived in Rockhampton and didn’t attend her wedding in Canada.  Her parents didn’t react well to her coming-out, and of her father she writes, ‘I took a lot away from him, including some of the dreams he’d had for me: of a conventional marriage, conventional life’ (137).  Meanwhile, her mother’s reaction to her wedding was virtually noncommittal, leading Michelle to understand that, for them, ‘My wedding hadn’t happened.  It hadn’t happened at all’ (180).  It had been ghosted.

Like Michelle, I was raised in a conservative rural community and my family had difficulty accepting that my brother was gay.  ‘Is he one of those?’ my grandmother once asked my cousin’s family.  My father’s reaction, ‘I hope he’ll change’, echoes Michelle’s father’s, to whom the possibility of Michelle’s marriage to Heather almost meant the possibility of divorce from her.

A fragment of a conversation with Dad about my brother remains with me – he mentioned how every parent has dreams for their children.  To me, a headstrong 22 year old, this was the height of folly: how dare a parent suggest their child live a certain way?  Our lives were our own, after all.  Later, I realised it’s hard to escape the imprint of your upbringing, and in a rural community the imperative is to get married, breed and not do anything out of the ordinary. 

After a few years Dad came around, and Michelle’s parents, too, became more accepting.  Her father, in his quiet way, told her he was from a different generation, but that ‘just because you don’t agree with someone, it doesn’t mean that you don’t talk to them ever again.  What sort of world would it be if we all did that? You’re my daughter’ (201).  I think the pollies would do well to listen to Michelle’s dad.   

I was also struck by title of Michelle’s book, Ghost Wife, for it taps into a long history of ghosting lesbians so as to deny their materiality – an attempt which ultimately backfires.  In The Apparitional Lesbian, Terry Castle documents how, since the eighteenth century, Western Europe has exorcised the threat of lesbianism by converting it into a phantasm:

Given the threat that sexual love between women inevitably poses to the workings of patriarchal arrangement, it has often been felt necessary to deny the carnal bravada of lesbian existence.  The hoary misogynist challenge, ‘But what do lesbians do?’ insinuates as much: This cannot be.  There is no place for this (Columbia UP, 1993, p. 30).

If lesbianism is something that cannot exist, it can hardly pose a threat.  And yet, Castle continues, ‘one could hardly think of a worse metaphor.  For embedded in the ghostly figure, as even its first proponents seemed at times to realise, was inevitably a notion of reembodiment: of uncanny return to the flesh … To become an apparition was also to become endlessly capable of “appearing”.  And once there, the spectre, like a living being, was not so easily gotten rid of.  It demanded a response.’ (p. 63).

Ghost Wife is one of these responses.  As was the rally which Heather and Michelle attended on the night of the award-giving.  The more politicians attempt to negate the rights of same-sex couples to marry, the louder the clamour will be.  In Ghost Wife, Michelle’s enunciation of injustice rings out with boldness and clarity, and readers will be well-rewarded for listening to it.

Book details: Dicinoski, Michelle.  Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance.  Collingwood: Black Inc., 2013.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 2nd review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.