Susan Green

This book is a Wine and Cheese Book Group choice, and when I picked it up, the coordinator lamented that it was a bit of a dud, and predicted that nobody would enjoy it.

Well, always one to be different, I did. Writing, publishing and bookselling is my old trade; 20th century British social and literary history is an enduring interest; and I’d read another memoir by this writer which was startlingly frank.  She was a partner and editor at the prestigious imprint Andre Deutsch from 1952 to 1993 from its humble post-war beginnings, an editor at the top of her game and, as it turned out, a sucessful memoirist as well.

Athill adored her work, and her ‘eye’ was legendary. While some books were essentially well-written and needed mere suggestions and tweaks, occasionally there was major re-writing involved. But even that was a joy; ‘like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained’. The personal lengths to which she would go for her authors were also legendary. For instance, Jean Rhys (author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a re-imagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s mad wife), was an impeccable artist but an utterly incompetent (Athill’s word) adult human. The many interventions to try to ‘save’ Jean from herself make tragic reading. And what she put up with from V S Naipaul, one of Andre Deutsch’s prized authors! What an entitled, sexist, nasty shit! I’ve never read any of his books and now I never will.

Born in 1917, Athill lived and loved and worked in a world that was transformed – often radically –  within her lifetime. I liked her rationale for writing Stet:

Why am I going to write it? Not because I want to provide a history of British publishing in the  second half of the twentieth century, but because I shall not be alive for much longer, and when I am gone all the experiences stored in my head will be gone too – they will be deleted with one swipe of the great eraser, and something in me squeaks ‘Oh no – let at least some of it be rescued!’ It seems to be an instinctive twitch rather than a rational intention, but no less compelling for that. By a long-established printer’s convention, a copy-editor wanting to rescue a deletion put a rove of dots under it and writes ‘Stet’ (let it stand) in the margin. This book is an attempt to ‘Stet’ some part of my experience in its original form…

Reading Stet was like being at a long lunch with someone sparklingly intelligent but with no sense of self-importance or need to impress. I imagine myself sitting quietly, listening to the flow of literary shop-talk, gossip and beady-eyed observation, wishing it would never stop…

I could start where I was: myself and those family stories. I had the image of a tight little frame, and my family stories neatly enclosed within it, telling their narrow bit of truth, and then the frame expanding out and out and out. As the frame expanded it would take in the people who were here when my forbears came into their land. Not to tell their story. Not to ask them to tell it. And not to catalogue the horrors. Just to travel to the places where the family stories happened, and put the stories and those First People back into the same frame, on the same country, and see what unfolded.

There are many things I loved about Unsettled, starting with its clever title. There are beautiful and lyrical descriptions that show me a land I recognise and love, and precise and orderly accounts of how that land was stolen. Not just by force, but also via bogus legalities.

Then there’s the perfect structure; a journey – a pilgrimage –  which took Grenville down the family tree, from her great-great-great-grandfather to her mother, back through the generations from Wiseman’s Ferry on the Hawkesbury to Tamworth. She traveled through the NSW landscape, trying to locate farms and pastoral properties and houses, taking the roads her forbears did. And taking that wider view, widening the frame to the First Nations people who were there first. All the time knowing and feeling that her family were:

…part of a relentless flood of foreigners who eventually pushed into every corner of the continent. Over many years they did their best to push out the people who were there. Took their country, their livelihood, their children and often their lives. 

I’m a non-Indigenous, 6th generation Australian; I’ve just started researching my family history. After reading Unsettled, I want to do better. I want to start putting Aboriginal people in the same frame as my great-great-grandparents who worked on Western District pastoral properties before the goldrush. I want to think differently about the words that I use in thinking and writing about my people.

The book made me pay real attention to the almost benign language that was used in the past – certainly in my schooldays –  to describe colonisation. Take the word settled. It’s a nice word. Even cosy. But, if some people settled, then other people were unsettled.  Kate Grenville italicises words to nudge the reader into thinking about alternative meanings for words we have used to talk about the history of Australia. Heritage. Squatter and pastoralist. Crown land. Explore. Open up. Taking up land means taking land from the people who already lived there.

My generation were told stories of pioneers; heroic men on horseback, with bullock drays and flocks of sheep. When we ‘did’ Australian history in grades 4 and 5,  nine-and ten-year-old self didn’t find the stories heroic; they were scarcely even interesting. I feel quite differently after reading Unsettled. Who knows? I might be inspired to drive to Lake Bolac, to try to find the place where my great-great grandfather lived as a boy. It was a remote place, a sheep run. The family story is that the men defended themselves against an attack by the local Aboriginal people. I suspect if I interrogate the story, I’ll find it was a massacre.

I’ve been circling this book for years, but the subject seemed to difficult. It’s about the
questions that come from being a non-Indigenous person in Australia. What do we do with the  fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past? If we acknowledge that we’re on land that was taken from other people, what do we do about that?

Unsettled is a quietly devastating, thoughtful and and necessary book.

This year, I thought I’d manage at least a post a week, but no. I’ve been reading, reading, reading – as usual – but not writing about it. Especially lately. We’re 27 weeks into the year, but I’ve only posted 12 times. “Must do better!” I tell myself…but I have valid excuses. The magical trip to Japan. Then, then a bad bout of Covid, followed by a death in the family and an unexpected 2 weeks in a hotel in Adelaide.
I will get my groove back, but let’s be realistic; I have no hope of catching up in any way, shape or form. So here is a helpfully categorised list of my reading from the beginning of June. The Old Familiars are perhaps over-represented, but they’re on my Kindle. And what the hell, is it wrong to seek comfort in trying times?

Comforting Old Familiars
Sense and Sensibility
Persuasion
Emma
by Jane Austen

Jane and Prudence
Some Tame Gazelle
A Glass of Blessings
No Fond Return of Love
Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym

Intriguing (or do I mean just strange?) Japanese Fiction
The Kagawa Food Detectives by Hishashi Kashiwai
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Distressing Non-Fiction
Stasiland by Anna Funder
The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan
You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the History of War by Elizabeth Becker

and finally, a wonderful and deserving and…

Utterly Beautiful Booker Prize Winner
Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I’ve been to Japan. Ten days in the South, on the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. Our guide, Yusuke, called these places ‘the last frontier’ of Japan, especially Shikoku which has around 3.8 million people (out of a total Japanese population of around 124 million) living on it, which makes it the most underpopulated of the four major islands. So we journeyed to quieter, more rural places, through forest, small towns and agricultural land and into smaller cities. Over-tourism in Japan is in the news, and there were tourists, certainly – but they were overwhelmingly Japanese and Korean. English was rarely spoken. Though illustrated menus were helpful, Google translate came in handy. However, the people in shops and restaurants were unfailingly patient, helpful and kind. With pointing, charades and smiles, we got got through.

Japan wasn’t a bucket-list destination of mine. It was not on my radar at all; actually, I’ve been dreaming of Sicily ever since I watched The Leopard as a teenager and I’m even learning Italian.
I decided to go when a friend confided that though she wanted to travel, she was hesitant. I said, on a whim, “I’ll go with you!” and we hit upon Japan. She, because her son recommended it as a good destination (safe, clean, amazingly different and beautiful).

And me? I had just watched the series Shogun. Thus are big – or biggish – decisions made.

Of course I took books. A fully-loaded Kindle. But instead of reading Murakami or one of the many Japanese books about cats, I read Pride and Prejudice again. And – is it so surprising? I find something new in Austen every time I read her novels –  it read very differently. I’m not going to pretend that I have any profound cross-cultural observations to make, but the varying codes of behaviour at Longbourn, Netherfield Park, Rosings and Pemberly seemed to find an echo. Because I’m so familiar with P&P, I think my perception of the strangeness of Regency customs and manners have usually been blunted. But being immersed in a society so foreign to me must have got me a little off-balance. The strait-jacket of manners and customs has never seemed so confining, nor financial security so precarious.

The story of Elizabeth and Darcy didn’t quite lose its fascination, but this time I seemed to take in the whole book as a web of social manouevres, debts, obligations and unequal relationships in a way that I hadn’t before.  It was pretty unromantic. Anti-romantic, even. And Lydia – ‘untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy and fearless’ – came out as one of the few characters who is uncalculating and authentic.

Reading Austen in Japan opened a big ol’ can of worms about Austen’s morality and world-view. Who knew? I look forward to travelling with her again.

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvellously productive you become once you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.

I worked in a bookshop for over 24 years, and over that time a mighty river of self-help titles flowed past me. The books ranged from the po-faced spiritual to the (arguably) scientific with a steady stream of faddish nonsense in between. I used to sample them, and it must have been primarily to torture myself. Because (though there were always a few useful ideas, even in the most idiotic), after reading them I always felt cross/grumpy/enraged/disbelieving. Rarely did they reflect life as I lived it. I have never possessed supernatural powers of concentration, self-discipline and willpower. Life, being unpredictable, predictably got in the way of the best plans for increased productivity, focus, personal growth, fitness and (yes, I’ll admit it) weight loss. All those charts, lists,  schedules and reminders ended up feeling both joyless and ultimately useless.

So Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking was a cheering entrant into the crowded field. I enjoyed his highly sceptical take on the whole project. His next book, 4,000 Weeks: Time and How To Use It clarified his central message. Which is that life is short, and we are never going to have the time to do all the things we think we must, should, need and want to do. Becoming more productive is a trap, because, for example, the more quickly we respond to emails, the more incoming emails come pinging into our inboxes. Checking off items on a long ‘to-do’ list only frees up time to make the list longer. Some of Burkeman’s ideas from that book I follow still. Embrace your limitations, and this includes the limitations of human life. It’s short. We can’t predict our futures. Anything can happen, at any time, to anyone. Abandon perfection. Rediscover the power of rest. And, very practically for a writer, write only 3 to 4 hours in a day.

Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts is a distillation of what he’s learned over the years of his quest to make better use of his time. He suggests that we abandon not only perfectionism, but those fantasy visions of your best life, your best self, your ideal existence. Because it’s never going to happen. I’ve already tried some of his practical advice – like practising ‘scruffy hospitality’, where you don’t clean the house from top to bottom before guests arrive, and eat a gourmet meal off matched plates with ironed table napkins. And I enjoy the excursions into religion, philosophy and spirituality which underpin much of his writing.

I highly recommend this book to all anxious over-achievers like me.

We spent last weekend camping in a bend of the river at our friends’ farm, not far from where we live. It’s a sheep property; you have to open three gates as you navigate your way down the rutted track through the paddocks and then down to the river to the campsite. It’s right on the river, tucked in among massive old river red gums –  ‘widow-makers’; no-one pitches a tent under them – and young trees. It’s private but not truly isolated, though it feels like it is because it seems to take longer to get from the gate down to the river than it did to drive there.
Nine friends; we’ve been having these farm camps for years now, but this time, there was a newcomer. Was this the perfect cast and setting for a ‘bush noir’ crime novel?

Well, no. It was all very jolly, the new friend was lovely and we all drove home happily leaving no corpse behind. Blame my weekend reading, Jane Harper’s Exiles, for my over-active imagination.

Exiles is her third novel featuring investigator Aaron Falk, and it’s set in a South Australian wine-growing area. Since my husband’s family comes from SA, I can picture the Maralee Valley (the Barossa) as easily as I could the parched farmlands of The Dry and the Gariwerd/Grampians landscape of Force of Nature. For me, as a country dweller, her well-observed rural settings and landscapes are an especial pleasure and she rarely strikes a false note.

Falk is in town to attend the christening of his friends Greg (another police officer) and Rita Raco’s child. The ceremony was meant to happen the year before, but when a local woman went missing at the local Food and Wine Festival, all plans were upended and Falk joined the community in the search. The woman’s body was never found, but it is generally accepted that the new mother was suffering post-natal depression and took her own life by slipping into a nearby dam, leaving her baby at the Festival, all alone in her pram. It’s something doesn’t ring true to a number of people. There’s a renewed appeal for information… and the secrets and lies begin to emerge.

Harper does these stories so well. Small town, tight knit community, a crime rooted in the past. A perfect Aussie camping holiday read.

I’d hate to be misunderstood: I’m looking for a man but without the least romantic interest. It’s long over. These days, more than a year since we parted, I think of him as a specimen. Today I’m on a field trip to study his habitat. But I’m jittery; I do not want to encounter this creature. Once, in his smiling eyes I saw good and gentle things. I held him tight and hoped for so much. Now I know that the smile was a simulation, the eyes black holes. I know to keep my distance.

Fake was a riveting read, almost like a crime novel. When renowned, successful journalist and writer Stephanie Wood is played by a narcissistic con man, she falls to pieces – and then pieces herself together again, bit by bit.

Part of her recovery was to use her journalistic training to turn detective and track down the truth about ‘Joe’, the man she meets online. A retired architect turned grazier, raising rare-breed sheep in country NSW, he’s unassuming – driving a beaten-up old car even though he’s filthy rich – and caring, intelligent and honest. Their connection is deep. As far as Wood is concerned, it’s love. She starts to believe they have a future together.

But not long after she starts her relationship with Joe, cracks start to appear in the love story. He makes last minute changes and cancellations. He’s elusive for days at a time. The excuses escalate. Reading how Wood was brought to an extreme and disabling state of anxiety and self-doubt and low self-esteem, it’s easy to see how it can happen. You don’t have to be stupid. Like Wood, most of us want to trust; we want to believe people are good and honest and mean what they say. Most of us are not expecting to meet with deception, lies and manipulation. As Wood digs into Joe’s life she finds he had no country acres, no rustic shack, no sheep. His Sydney house belonged to his ex-wife. He drove an old car because he was bankrupt and in debt. And as a final sting, he was often unavailable because he was in a relationship with another woman at the same time. She exposes him as a narcissist, a fantasist. A fake.

It must have taken real courage for Wood to expose her intimate story in this way but there’s ultimately a hopeful message. To get past the shame, the self-doubt, the anxiety and distress, Wood concentrated on healing –  and experienced what psychologists call ‘post-traumatic growth’. Life became good again. Different – with no happy ending with a handsome prince, or even a middle-aged grazier – but good.

Forget the life you wanted or expected, grab the life you have, she writes. Stop belting yourself up… Look for joy everywhere

Like many autistic people, I knew I was ‘different’ from a young age – and I knew that different was not a good thing – so I constantly tried to be more like people wanted me to be…

In an unpublished (unpublishable?) novel from 2020 I wrote some chapters from the point of view of a female doctor who happened to be autistic. I’d done some superficial reading on the autism spectrum, so I included clunky details like an obsession with graphs and statistics and an aversion to hugs. I had her deal awkwardly with her patients, preferring to stare at her screen while they talked instead of meeting their eyes; I made her the unwitting villain of the piece because of her lack of empathy. I realise now that a lot of the information I accessed was based on the more familiar male ‘Aspy’ tropes of train-spotting and jotting down number plates and Big Bang Theory stereotypes.

More and more books are now being published that deal explicitly with the female presentation of autism, which can be very different to that of males. Females on the spectrum can be highly skilled at masking their differences; they can be more socially adept; their ‘obsessions’ (My Little Pony, pop stars, clothes, crafts) can be socially acceptable). They can be creative, articulate and actually even BAD AT MATHS. No wonder so many young girls have missed diagnoses.

Sandra Thom-Jones was a respected professional with a family, a career, friends and a nagging sense that something is not quite right in her life.  And with two sons diagnosed with autism, she comes to a realisation that the struggles and difficulties could have an explanation. The sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, of ‘not fitting in’, of failing to meet the life challenges that other folks sail through… Could she be autistic too?

Growing Into Autism is her account of her experience of late diagnosed autism, with some useful but more general information tacked on. Thom-Jones structures her account around the DSM-5 (Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition) criteria, such as ‘restricted, repetitive behaviour patterns’ and ‘deficits in social communication and interaction’. She explains that she uses these categories ‘not to medicalise autism (or myself) but rather to give an understanding of what those very formal scientific phrases mean in the lived experience of an autistic person’.

So, for example, under ‘restricted, repetitive patterns’ she talks about her extreme and painful sensory hypersensitivity and how it leads to a self-protective shield of habits and routines, to perfectionism, overwhelm and burnout. She talks too about her ‘stimming’ – self-stimulatory behaviours.  I remember the intellectually disabled people I worked with in the mid 1970’s; I didn’t realise that the head-banging, hand-flapping, rocking and spinning were all coping strategies to help deal with negative emotions like anxiety or frustration. After her diagnosis, Thom-Jones embraced a whole repertoire of activities she can call on to self-soothe. Some of them are socially acceptable, like fidgeting or knitting, but when she’s at home, she can sing, dance, twirl, repeat random phrases and play with soft toys or her collection of dolls or other comfort objects. The more she lets herself behave naturally as her autistic self, the happier she is.

The over-arching theme of this book is the relief that her diagnosis provided. Thom-Jones is released to evolve as a someone with a different brain, successful in her own terms instead of being a failed, faulty neurotypical. (Though I do actually wonder if there is any such thing as a typical person! Every one of us seems to have some challenge or other…)

Just a note: the horrible (in my eyes) cover is explained by her love of the colour pink. In an author pic I saw, she has pink hair and pink clothes.

And a further note: how I would love to have access to Thom-Jones’s stash. Knitting, she says, has been a life-saver and she has collected hundreds of balls of wool, more than she can ever knit with in her lifetime. Just because she loves loves loves yarn. Divine. Sigh.

Having played to her heart’s content, Chibi would come inside and rest for a while. When she began to sleep on the sofa – like a talisman curled gently in the shape of a comma and dug up from a prehistoric archaeological site – a deep sense of happiness arrived, as if the house itself had dreamed this scene.

The narrator – a writer and editor – and his wife both work from home in a rented cottage on a larger estate. He observes the comings and goings in the little zig-zag lane (‘Lightning Alley’) that runs by their home. There’s another a family – man, woman, child – nearby. They adopt a cat.

Over time, the narrator and his wife begin to observe the cat’s comings and goings, too. She begins to visit their garden, and then starts to check them out. Slowly, she begins to investigate the interior of the house. She plays, takes naps, allows herself to be fed.  The couple provide a bed and easy access through a window; dishes and her favourite foods; a bed; toys. They give her a name; Chibi, which means ‘little one’. Her idiosyncrasies and mercurial feline ways are a constant source of interest and delight for them. Chibi becomes part of their lives.
But she’s not theirs.

Apparently The Guest Cat, written by Japanese poet Takashi Hiraide and first published in English in 2014, was a bestseller in the US and France. Which is slightly surprising because it’s a such a gentle, quiet and thoughtful book. It has a cat in it, but it’s by no means a cute kitty love-fest. I’m a fast and often headlong reader, and I had to slow right down so that I could actually savour the small joys and observations; the cat getting plum blossom petals on her fur and smelling lizards in the garden, the narrator watching two mating dragonflies form the shape of a heart, the pink feet of birds landing on an area of glass roof.

There’s more to the book than the narrator and the cat – set in the 1980s, in Tokyo, there’s a financial contraction, difficulties buying and renting real estate, work issues, gallery openings, book launches, the illness and death of a colleague, social gatherings with friends. The narrator takes care  of the old lady who owns their cottage and lives in the big house on the estate after her husband goes into a home. And after she moves, he keeps an eye on the empty house and the neglected garden.
Nothing much happens, except towards the very end, but all the elements come together to meditate on change, transience, connection, attention, care. Not that the author beats you over the head with any of these themes; it’s all as subtle and light as one of those petals on Chibi’s fur.

I found I had this postcard; it’s called ‘The Tailor’s Cat’ (1927) and it’s by an artist called Tsugouharu Leonard Foujita (1886-1968). I recognised the cat’s eyes on the cover.

I’m not just an observer any more. I’m realising that I care about the team.

A very different book about teenage boys.
Yesterday evening, I loaned my library copy (yes, I know; bad) to a trusted and fast-reading friend, and she texted me her thoughts the next morning: ‘Total unashamed grandma doting with football as the side dish”. I couldn’t have said it better.

It’s Melbourne in autumn and winter, footy season, when a collective madness takes over a large portion of the population. While her youngest grandson trains and plays with his under-16 team, Garner sets herself the task of observing. With her  trademark sharp, shrewd and tender gaze she takes in the coach, the boys, their families, passers-by, joggers and dog walkers, the weather, the sky, her mood, the traffic to and from the ground. By the end of the season, she’s not just a watcher; she’s all in.

Garner has described The Season as ‘a nanna’s book about football’, and her grandmotherliness extends to all the boys. She glories in their strong young bodies growing fitter, musclier, manlier as the season progresses. She admires their grace and grit, their comradeship and competitiveness. She sympathises with their disappointments and stuff-ups. There are some down times – illness, tiredness, self-doubt, foul weather – but she sticks it out and as the team nears the finals, her involvement (does this count as a spoiler?) starts to build…

And it took me back to nine seasons of soccer. Late afternoon training sessions and early morning games in freezing Central Victorian winter. Over the years my car-load of boys got bigger and hairier and stronger and louder and more skilful each season. Their conversations were hilarious; the smell of them – feet! muddy uniforms! sweat mixed with Lynx deodorant! – intense. I used to buy a bag of hot donuts for the ride home, and that smell, too, is linked with those times.

I was a mama, not a nanna, and perhaps my doting was not quite as absolute as Garner’s, but I just loved those boys. This is a joy of a book.