Drusilla Modjeska

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.

While they were written at a time of highly charged crisis – both politically, and personally for their authors – their urgency still speaks to us as readers of our own charged times. For as well as the stripping of a person, the reduction of a man to ‘a swear-word on two legs’, the question that cannot be avoided is what about the rest of us? What does such stripping say about the polity, the social and political order, that encompasses us all?

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.

It’s no easy task to render a sprawling archive into a narrative that captures the significance of Paula Modersohn-Becker for a readership a century later – a figure not only of her time but also for ours. A trace, she calls it, and yes, it is her trace and with it she achieves – more than existing studies have – the aim Hermione Lee posits for all forms of biographical and life-writing: ‘a living person in a body, not a smoothed-over figure’.

A modernist novel of a colonial moment told with a postcolonial mind: ‘Thirty-five years after its first publication,’ writes Drusilla Modjeska in her introduction to a new edition of Randolph Stow’s 1979 novel, ‘Visitants remains, in my view, the finest Australian novel that takes Papua New Guinea as its inspiration and dilemma.’

Two memoirs, one fiction? Or one family history, two fictions entwined into a single narrative, and a ‘reflection on the arc of a life’? All three of these books show women writing themselves into being, as they construct narrative from the raw materials of unwieldy lives, whether imagined or real. Each writes and rewrites sensation, tactile detail, exchange or confrontation, revising and rediscovering through the process. Sophia Barnes on new work by Drusilla Modjeska, Debra Adelaide and Beth Yahp