Memoir

Leila carries a small bag but a lot of troubles.

When we meet at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre on unceded Gadigal land, the intention is to nurture a homely space so that people seeking asylum, especially women and their children can flourish in ways that are safe.

It is Friday afternoon. We gather every week to anchor this place in the practice of love, care and creativity.

These are our tools and they are all we have.

What a time to be reading about Annie Ernaux’s self-obliterating affair with S from the Soviet embassy in Paris, not that you’d sense that something’s in the air from the English-language reception to Getting Lost, Ernaux’s diary of the relationship, published in English last September. In the diary and in its generally admiring reviews S is described as a diplomat, apparatchik, attaché, ‘faithful servant of the USSR’ (Ernaux) and Brezhnev nostalgic/Stalin apologist when drunk. Also: ‘He is somewhat, not to say very, anti-Semitic: “Isn’t Mitterrand Jewish?” ’ Pretty standard stuff. Come on. He would have been KGB.

Rurality and mobility are polarities within registers of logic that animate the new worlds of both women. Our protagonist wishes to retain both in the hope of dwelling perpetually in her personal landscape of myths as she journeys through myriad worlds. 

Was my father a good artist? Did his work have value? These were never questions that arose.

There is a sub-genre of metafiction that presents to the reader the writer who can no longer write, but who, in the process of writing about his writer’s block, has written the book that you are reading.

These books, mostly hybrids of personal essay, reportage and autofiction, if read chronologically, become a metanarrative of his quest to offer an unvarnished vision of a complex human, a modern-day naked Rousseau, inspired by the inward gaze of Montaigne.

Even if Louis, by becoming an international best-selling author has ostensibly left his class background, he knows, as I do, that you never really leave.

Driving was something that was for other people, a way of interfacing easily with the world that I would always lack. 

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and necessary to build your identity using what you see around you, but this work is collaborative rather than transactional or instructional.

Hard Joy widens the lens, looking back across the span of seventy years to consider those fundamental human questions of what makes us, and who makes us.