Memoir

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

Each of the editors in Literary Lion Tamers was successful in large part because of their ability to persuade authors to be published by them and, then to convince readers to buy their books.

Amid the detours and the fragments, the sky-blue grip of life holds its own against the centrifugal force of illness and death. Which is why I describe these books, in some odd, indefinable way, as invigorating.

‘How did I get here, exactly? I rang my father from the red phone box on the footpath outside my grandmother’s, praying that she wouldn’t spring me inside my emergency-coloured beacon. She doesn’t, because down inside the house below street level Grandmother Margaret is also ringing my father, but from the landline.

‘Three days later my father arrives to ferry me back to live in Canvastown, Marlborough. I know I am about to fall off the grid. The grid, as I know it, comprises a circle of girlfriends from relatively stable middle-class homes, my A-student niche, my weekend prowls, life as my grandmother’s last daughter. Despite my scarlet phone call, I feel I have no real say in the abrupt termination of these things.’

I have used the word ‘magic’ to describe this book, and it occurs to me again that there is a spell at work here, an incantation as old as time, as fresh as a splash of clear water. Here are the stories of the world, he says; here is my story; here is theirs; here is yours. And they are all spinning together. Pay attention, for these distractions are not distractions; they are the substance of the story of everything. ‘There is an almost super-connectedness between events.’

What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.

Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual – that it’s a ruse, yet another trick – and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vision, the intricacy of her argumentation, the richness of her sources, the cultivation of her contradictory style, pitched between brashness and eloquence, and the pleasures of her experimentation: Blueberries testifies against its author.

One billion animals don’t just die without retribution. Some strong message was saying that were doing things all the way wrong and that a shelter-in-place could provide some food for thought on what we could do next.

‘Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.’ It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

I’ve always preferred Medea. I love her unhinged at the breakup of her relationship and then her transformation in the second act into the terrifying producer of her own drama. I imagine my mother as Medea, her waist-long hair jet black and shiny.