Lizabelle

Trigger warning: this post is about death and bereavement. Please skip it if you need to.



I barrel into the living room, my borrowed dressing gown hanging loose despite the chill in the air.

“He’s gone,” I say breathlessly. My sister – tense, exhausted, pregnant – stumbles up from the sofa and into the first spontaneous hug we’ve shared in years.

“Mum says, do you want to see him,” I add, and she nods, already turning toward the staircase, while I head off in search of our other sister. We are both scrubbing away tears.

Upstairs, the nurses move unobtrusively around the bed, somehow giving us space to gather, privacy to cry if we need to. But after the initial flurry of tears, mostly we don’t cry. This morning has been nearly a decade in the making, a strained, inexorable, torturous toil for all of us - me, my two sisters, my mum - but most of all for my dad, who is no longer lying in the bed, although his body, emaciated and ravaged by motor neurone disease, remains there.

It’s six years since he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, aka ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Eight, maybe nine years since we noticed the personality changes that turned out to be the results of the disease. Six and a half years, I think, since he collapsed on the Metro after running his last Great North Run. Eight years of anxiety, denial, heartbreak and horror as our worst fears were realised without any of us, least of all Dad, being capable of stopping them.

Our family has been devastated, all of us broken open.

It’s 2003, February 24, and my beautiful, open-hearted dad is dead.

*

This afternoon I am hunched over my laptop, trying to work out how to pay tribute to him. It’s been ten years, and I feel I should be able to say something meaningful, something to celebrate his life rather than grieving, as I still seem to be, over his death.

But I am still grieving. I am still angry and heartbroken that my dad, who was the kindest, bravest person I’ve ever known, could suffer and die the way he did – slowly, terrifyingly, humiliatingly. I am not sure I will ever not be angry. Not so much with the people who failed him, who were only doing their best. Not so much with myself, although it’s taken years to stop reproaching myself for not being a better daughter; for not spending more time with him and giving him more of my love while I could. For not making everything better.

Basically, I’m angry with life itself for dealing him such a rotten card. Why should it be him, of all the people in the world? When he devoted his life to doing good; when he wandered the streets of Newcastle, unafraid and without judgement, offering aid wherever he saw a need? When his name was a byword for compassion, why was life so cruel to him, in the end?

It’s been ten years. I’ll never get an answer to that question. All I can do is remember.

So for starters, here’s a song he loved, and which I also love.

This weekend, I am spending my time with close friends who have supported me in some of the toughest moments of my life. I entered a 10 km race this week, because my dad taught me that it doesn’t matter if you’re slow, as long as you keep going until the end. Tomorrow, I will be working on translations, as always, because he introduced me to the most beautiful language in the world. I’ll be reading poetry and remembering the poems he wrote for me when I was a little girl. I will be writing, proud in the knowledge that he was a published writer and it’s OK for me to aspire to emulate him. And that it'll be OK even if I never do, as long as I write from my heart.

I will be going out into the world and trying to be the best, most compassionate person I can be, because of his example. That’s the best tribute I can pay him right now.


If you want to know more about motor neurone disease or would like to support those who are living with the disease, the Motor Neurone Disease Association is a good place to start.

ETA: Here's an English translation of one of the poems I linked to, Pär Lagerkvist's Det är vackrast när det skymmer - thanks to PM Newton for the link.

"So how are you finding being back in the UK?" I've been here five months now, and I get this question a lot, often with an ancillary comment about the weather.

I understand why people ask it, and I also understand that, often, what they really want to know is whether I'm all right, after turning my life upside down the way I have done. And sometimes I'm all right and sometimes I'm not; things have been tough, and will be for a while.

But to answer the question literally, let me tell you what being back in the UK means to me:

It's walking down a busy street with two kids I adore waving and shouting at me from across the road. It's the ache when my newest niece smiles and snuggles into my shoulder. It's spending time with the sisters I've missed so much. It's knowing I can be there for my mum.



It's renewing old friendships and forging new ones. It's being honest with people, because I no longer have to pretend that I'm happy to be where I am. It's growing in confidence, because life is hard and sometimes sad but I am doing this by myself.

It's dozing in the park or drinking by the river with friends. It's finding beauty in the heart of London and escaping to the country for weekends. It's snuggling up to my friend's dog or walking him through the fields. It's the spark of bonfires or a friend's cigarette smoke. It's running in the rain, through the petrol fumes and chilly air.

It's being caught up in the autumn reds and a robin hopping across my path. It's a cat curled next to me, not caring how I look as long as I have love to share. It's jumpers and scarves and wearing short skirts, and it's a room of my own with bookshelves to spare.

It's the most beautiful train journey I've ever known. It's people being polite on the Tube.

It's drinking wine with my friend and reading to her daughter before bed. It's texts from my niece, kisses from my nephew, late night chats with my sisters and friends.

It's watching Wimbledon in real time and football in pubs. It's talking writing on the South Bank with talented women, and talking books in beer gardens as the evenings draw in. It's twenty gigs to choose from, it's the city-smoky air, and it's the river, the river, the river.



It's building a life. It's being home.

If I close my eyes I can imagine crashing. I see it in slow motion, like a crash-test dummy reconstruction where I'm the dummy. The Laser swerving across the road to hit a brick wall - the one near the sports grounds at the back of Seaforth - yellow bonnet crumpling, metal screeching, indicator lights exploding and spraying orange glass. My neck whiplashes forward, the windscreen shatters and the car presses in around me like a cocoon. Tight, tight, tighter, the warmest hug in the world.

It scares me. I don't want to do it. But sometimes I think it's the only way I'll be able to turn off what's in my head.

(From chapter 2 of Raw Blue.)

Carly is living a half-life, working dead hours in a restaurant so she can surf during the day, and generally trying to get by without being noticed. Surfing is the only way she knows to be happy, because it allows her to forget the awful thing that happened to her - the thing she refuses to talk about, but which permeates every aspect of her existence.

Despite her best efforts, Carly becomes pulled into the lives of others, most notably a lonely woman in the flat above, an oddball kid and an attractive surfer with a mysterious past of his own.

The thing about hiding from your trauma is that it doesn't go anywhere. It stays in your head, taking up more and more space, becoming more and more impermeable, until inevitably you crash into it. In Raw Blue, the reader can see the crash coming from chapter one, but the narrative is so compelling, so exquisitely, quietly painful, that (to adopt a cliché) it's impossible to look away.

Because Carly's narrative, filled as it is with the minutiae of a life unlived, is hugely compelling. Her uncertainties and fears (what will happen if she does this? How will someone react if she puts a foot wrong?) are exaggerated versions of those faced by many of us as we navigate the world on a daily basis. She is smart but vulnerable and dedicated to being invulnerable, constantly prepared to forestall the next bad thing that might happen to her.

From Carly's viewpoint even her escape (surfing) is fraught with tension. Take the line-up of surfers, with its internal politics and suspicion of outsiders, women and children. The chaos of the ocean despite Coastalwatch's best efforts at prediction. Carly's attempts to stay under the radar, which are continually thwarted by the attentions, well-intentioned or not, of her fellow surfers. However hard she tries, she can't avoid bumping up against other people and her own past.

As a first novel, Raw Blue is seriously impressive - and I haven't even mentioned a lot of the things I liked about it, so I'll just list them briefly here: the setting (Sydney's Northern Beaches), the taut, compelling writing, the understated anger (so understated that you get the impression even Carly doesn't realise it's there) in the narrative voice, the way what was done to Carly is dealt with, the very lovely (and yet imperfect) Ryan, Eagar's obvious love for the ocean. This is the first of Kirsty Eagar's books that I've read, and I will be on the lookout for more.

Version I read: Catnip Books paperback won in a competition held by Shelleyrae of Book'd Out. The book is available in Australia, the UK and I believe also in the USA.
To learn more about Kirsty Eagar, check out her website.

I haven't had much emotional space for writing recently (at least, not for fiction-writing; I've filled reams of journal space), and am only now starting to delve back into my long-term projects. I'd forgotten how much strength it takes to break through those initial barriers, and to ignore the voice that demands, "Why am I doing this and why do I think anyone would ever want to read it?" Not to mention the one that says, "You will never write anything worth reading."

Which is why I'm lucky that some of the efforts I put in before blowing my life up have born fruit. They've given me something to cling to, and I shall post them here so I can keep clinging when I need it.

I had an article published on Australian women's lifestyle website The Hoopla: My Dad. What might have been. It's the first time I've written openly about the most terrible time in my life, so putting the story out there was nerve-wracking, to say the least, but I also received some wonderful feedback and, perhaps most importantly, discovered I'm not alone. (I also discovered that sometimes people will pay you for your writing, which was nice.)

One of my short stories was recently shortlisted for the Pittwater Short Story Award. It didn't win, but it's the first time (to my knowledge) that anything I've written has been shortlisted, so I'm looking on it as progress. It was also lovely to share the shortlist with my friend and fellow writer, Zena Shapter. Another new, positive experience. :)

Small steps. But a few droplets of success, quenching my thirst just enough to keep me going.

Boarding schools. They have captured my imagination ever since, aged seven, I was heartbroken to be told by my mum that I couldn't go to St Clare's because it didn't exist.

Part of me likes to think that somewhere in the Bernese Oberland the Chalet School is going strong, still churning out trilingual girls who become teachers and then marry doctors. And that on the Cornish coast, Rebecca Mason is still practising her tennis while the other girls learn to surf.

One of the reasons I initially fell in love with the Harry Potter books was because of the way JK Rowling plays with the boarding school trope. Hogwarts is basically an old-fashioned boarding school that happens to teach magic, and Rowling sticks to the academic year structure throughout the books (although oh, how I missed the school setting in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows).

In I'll Tell You Mine, Pip Harry brings the boarding school trope bang up to date and into the southern hemisphere. Fifteen-year-old Kate Elliot has done something terrible: so terrible that her family is shunting her off to the local boarding school so they don't have to deal with her. As you would expect, she is not happy about this, and things don't get any better when she finds herself sharing a dormitory with the in-crowd and another girl who's as much of an outcast as herself.

Kate is a goth -- which, at school, makes her a freak. Worse than this, boarding school also presents a major obstacle to socialising with her friends, fellow goth Annie and musician Nate. Obviously, Kate isn't going to take all this lying down...

I loved Kate as a character, even if sometimes I wanted to shake her. She's sad and snarky and vulnerable -- and completely believable at every turn. And as we gradually learn more about the events leading up to her banishment, we realise that no one person is to blame.

I think that might be my favourite aspect of the novel. Pip Harry writes all the characters sensitively; even the people who initially seem to lead charmed lives are flawed and they all do bad or stupid things, but as a reader I could always understand why they did them. The progression of the relationship between Kate and her mother is truly touching, and I speak as someone who had a torrid relationship with her own mother in her teens. Nothing is straightforward, and this novel reflects that perfectly.

Kate's voice comes through very strongly right from the first page -- but despite the teenage diction that peppers the pages, the writing feels very precise, as if every word has earned its place. Similarly, Kate's family history feels fully realised, but there's no superfluous information. Everything she tells us is for a reason. One of the more beautiful moments of the book -- Kate's memory of a family holiday, in which, "Liv was too young to have a go [at surfing] on her own but Dad chucked her on the front of his wide Mal and pulled her up to her feet. She was screaming with excitement when she crested down the front of the wave with Dad's hand clutching at the back of her bathers." -- is principally there for contrast. "That was a highlight." The rest of the holiday is memorable, not for its good moments, but for its failures and for what Kate learned about her parents' marriage.

To return to the boarding school setting, I loved that the school remained a character until the end. Sometimes with YA literature it feels as if the author can't wait to get the characters away from the constraints of school, but here, Pip Harry uses every aspect of boarding school life to broaden the story. And despite Kate's mixed feelings about it, I've added Norris Grammar to my mental list of "schools I would like to have known". Which is about the best compliment I can pay the book, really.

Version I read: University of Queensland Press paperback from Kinokuniya Sydney. Also available online at fishpond.com.au.
Pip Harry blogs at http://www.pipharry.com/

In my first read for the Australian Women Writers 2012 challenge, I picked up a book I've been meaning to read for a while: Equilibrium, by Meredith Shayne.

I don't often read romance, so I'm not terribly familiar with the conventions of the genre, but I very much enjoyed this story. Small-town New South Wales seems like the perfect place for veterinarian Michael to escape his demons - especially when he meets ex-policeman Ryan Mitchell, who is steady, kind and gorgeous. But when a family crisis hits, so do Michael's demons, and suddenly it looks as if he might lose everything, past, present and future.

Shayne has a knack for creating realistically flawed yet sympathetic characters. A possible exception to this is Ryan, who seems to have no flaws at all - but as he's my dream steady, supportive male character, I can't really complain about that! The supporting cast are briefly but believably drawn, particularly Michael's sister and best friend.

The writing is solid throughout - quietly evocative without ever feeling showy. I liked the slow build of the romance, and I thought the sex was well done; I often cringe away from sex scenes in books, but there was no need for that here.

The ending didn't quite work for me, in that it felt slightly rushed. Part of that is a function of the format of the story, in which the action is divided across twelve months. But I felt a little more attention could have been given to wrapping things up. I gather there is a novella sequel to the story, which I'll be looking out for in the next few months; I'd happily read much more about these characters!

Summary: An excellent, satisfying read for anyone who likes m/m romance. I will definitely look out for more from Meredith Shayne in future.
Edition I read: Kindle ebook. The paperback version is available from Dreamspinner Press, where you can also read an excerpt from the book.

I'm currently working my way through volume one of Lucy Maud Montgomery's journals. Most of you will know her as the author of the Anne books, some of my most beloved childhood reads.

Maud herself is a delight - full of the passion for life and stories that shine through in Anne. Here she is on 4 April 1899, talking about stories:

"I have no doubt that it is a wise ordinance of date - or Providence? - that I cannot get all the books I want or I should certainly never accomplish much. I am simply a "book drunkard"...the first new story I read in '99 was "Phroso" by Anthony Hope. I...sat up in bed until two o'clock, shivering and freezing but quite indifferent to it, and finished the book before I could sleep. It was a glorious yarn - full of life and "go". It was romance pure and simple, without any alloy of realism or philosophy. I like realistic and philosophical novels in spells,but for pure, joyous, undiluted delight give me romance. I always revelled in fairytales."

Sound familiar to anyone? :)

It's also fascinating to see how she takes her own experiences and remodels them for her stories. A description of her thoughts on hearing of the death of a would-be lover (dated 24 July 1899) could come straight from the end of Anne of the Island:

"There would be no answering smile on his pale cold lips, no tender light in the dark blue eyes whose flash used to stir my heart into stinging life. Oh,kneeling there I thought it all over - that winter in Bedeque with its passion and suffering, all its hours of happiness and sorrow. I lived again in thought every incident of my acquaintance with Herman Leard from first to last - all those mad sweet hours and those sad bitter hours."

For me, the Anne books were as much about Prince Edward Island as they were about Anne. Here is LM Montgomery letting the words flow in another entry from 1899, describing what would become Lover's Lane in the Anne books:

( The old spring, deep and clear and icy cold, is on our path. The brook purls softly by and the old firs whisper over it as of yore.... )

Highly recommended!

Are you wondering where to get your literary fix now that the Sydney Writers' Festival is over for another year? Never fear; there are loads of events to choose from, and I've listed as many as I could find below.

I did this last year as part of my post-writers' festival comedown and it seemed fairly popular; I may even try to keep the list updated this time.

Upcoming literary events in Sydney:

08 June: Paul McGeough talks about his book, Infernal Triangle at Gleebooks; arrive 6 pm for 6.30 pm. Details and bookings here.

09 June: Samantha Brett and Donna Sozio at Dymocks George St, 6 pm. Info here.

09 June: Dominic Smith talks about his book, The Bright and Distant Shores at Gleebooks; arrive 6 pm for 6.30 pm. Details and bookings here.

09 June: Betty Churcher and her Notebooks at Berkelouw Mona Vale, 6.30 pm. More info here.

10 June: Launch: Sex, Genes and Rock and Roll by Robert Brooks at Gleebooks; arrive 6 pm for 6.30 pm. Details and bookings here.

14 June: Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno on the Australian Labor Party at Gleebooks; arrive 6 pm for 6.30 pm. Details and bookings here.

( Lots more under here )

Did I miss anything? Let me know by leaving a comment - or catch me @liza_belle on twitter.

My last day at the Sydney Writers' Festival began with AC Grayling, who spoke without notes for an hour on the origins of his The Good Book and its reception. His intent was to create a kind of humanist equivalent of the King James bible which, instead of telling people how to live in order to succeed in the hereafter, would offer up thinking material so that they could decide how to live in the here and now.

Living in this way entails a responsibility to own our decisions. Grayling quoted Socrates, who said that "The unexamined life is not worth living." Each individual is capable of doing the thinking and making the choices which, when acted upon, will add up to a well-lived life.

I have often said that I try to treat others the way I would like to be treated - to be honest, this is pretty much my mantra for living. According to Grayling, however, George Bernard Shaw said that this was a bad idea, because others may not like being treated in that way. It's a joke, but there's a serious point to it, which is that making oneself (or one anything: you as a person, a single religion, a totalitarian ideology) the benchmark of how you like to be treated, is a very distorting, one-sided view. We need to respect difference, not try to suppress it. Grayling expressed this as the need to "be generous and capacious in our understanding of human variety."

Proving this point later that day was Mardi McConnochie, who cited a lack of empathy with the boat people around whom so much Australian political debate is centred as one of her reasons for writing The Voyagers. She asked herself when "nice, ordinary white people" were last displaced on a large scale, and came up with the Second World War. Her novel is in part an attempt to comment on the effects of war and suffering on those who live through it.

McConnochie set out to write a love story that was both satisfying and literary, using the theme of music to represent a kind of order in the face of war as a chaotic, destructive force. Music is a "heart" form of art, she said (as opposed to writing, which is more cerebral). Music is the language that the characters speak; it is their common currency. As someone who has always loved music, perhaps too much in some ways, I really enjoyed this part of the conversation.

Music allows the characters of Mandy Sayer's latest novel to connect and break out of their assigned roles - roles assigned both by the war and by society. Love in the Years of Lunacy also deals with the effects of the Second World War on ordinary people, this time in Sydney. The setting allows for another theme to emerge: the fact that US military is fighting fascism overseas while practising its own form of fascism in the form of racial segregation - segregation that Australia was required to enforce by, for example, providing separate bars for Black and white Americans.

Obviously, Australia has its own murky race issues. Nicole Watson turned to writing after being frustrated by her work as a case manager on the Native Title Tribunal. She felt that the process was not an empowering one for Aboriginal people, and imagined a situation in which the tables were turned. With her book, The Boundary, she wanted to write a story in which the Aboriginal characters had agency.

PM Newton's The Old School also features a non-white protagonist, half-Vietnamese Nhu (inevitably nicknamed Ned) Kelly. While Nhu's heritage was a conscious choice on Newton's part, she also pointed out that it is dangerous to envisage characters purely as symbols. The character has to live, breathe and speak as well as represent something. Similarly, place can play a major factor in many crime novels, but this isn't (or shouldn't be) just about the scenery. For true resonance, you need to tie the sense of place to a period in time and the issues relevant to people at that time. Her own novel is set in 1992, when the New South Wales police force was facing a major corruption inquiry, and the characters' awareness of that investigation and its implications underpins the entire story. Newton cited Michael Dibdin as a good example of this kind of crime writing, saying that the crimes in his stories could only happen in that place, to those people, at that particular time.

Shamini Flint commented that Asian novels tend to be sweeping, exotic epics covering several generations in a manner that she dubbed the "over-exoticisation of Asia for western audiences". She is more interested in the way historical strands play out in contemporary society in Asia. Each of her "Inspector Singh Investigates" novels is set in a different place (so far all in Asia), and she roots at least one motive for the crime in the society about which she is writing.

I've already read (and highly recommend) PM Newton's The Old School. After Sunday's festival sessions, I added books by Mardi McConnochie, Mandy Sayer, Nicole Watson and Shamini Flint to my to-read list; it was great to see so many articulate, entertaining women committed to using their writing to say something about the world in which we live.

And that was my last day of the writers' festival. Sixteen events and many inspiring, impassioned speakers on writing, beauty, politics, the environment and the future of humanity. Time to get out there and live. :)

This event was the highlight of the festival for me: three intelligent, strong, compassionate women all speaking eloquently and movingly on subjects close to their hearts. It's another long post, because almost everything they said felt important to me.

Maxine McKew kicked off proceedings by asking all three panellists to give their reactions to the death of Osama Bin Laden. Ingrid Betancourt said that she did not feel Bin Laden's death should be celebrated, with which the other panellists agreed. Aminatta Forna contrasted this case with that of Charles Taylor, who in 2006 was flown into Sierra Leone to face war crimes charges in the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The people came out onto the streets to watch, Forna said, because this was a time when you could literally see that justice was being done. That court was funded by the US, and yet it seems the US did not want to take the justice route with Bin Laden.

Fatima Bhutto agreed with Betancourt and Forna, and observed that she is more concerned about the current violence in Pakistan than with Bin Laden's death. People are shot every day, and the situation is exacerbated by US drone strikes - she alleged that these have killed over two thousand people in Pakistan, largely civilians, since 2006.

The conversation moved onto the personal tragedies that the three women have experienced. In captivity, Betancourt felt that she had a responsibility as well as a right to be free. Even though she knew that any rescue attempt might mean her death, she preferred to die in the struggle for freedom rather than remaining a captive for, say, another twenty years.

She also praised the courage of her rescuers, who pretended they were working with the FARQ in order to gain access to her, and were completely unarmed when they executed their plan. They are the true heroes, she said.

( More under here )

Hope, she said, comes from ordinary people. And in these three extraordinary women, ordinary people like me can certainly find plenty of inspiration and hope.