by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
My heart aches now that she is gone. I wish I had been kinder, that I could have let her enjoy her brief flare of passion, that I had trusted her love. I wish she had been less damaged by reckless men and enveloped by the love she deserved. But life is a long lesson and from this distance I prefer to look back with tenderness on those riotous years when we were adolescents together. And for both of us I say, no regrets.
WHO OWNS MY STORY?
REBECCA STARFORD
‘The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.’ So proclaimed JP Donleavy, Irish-American author of the celebrated novel The Ginger Man, first published in 1955 and banned for obscenity in Ireland and the United States. The novel details the debauched sexual exploits of young Sebastian Dangerfield, a student of law at Trinity College, whose character is said to be inspired by Donleavy’s experiences.
I have often returned to this quote as I reflect on my own recently published memoir Bad Behaviour, which is set predominantly during my adolescence. The memoir explores the year I spent in a boarding school in the bush as a 14-year-old, and how my experiences both as being a bully and being bullied came to shape me as an adult. While mostly preoccupied with the relationships I had with other girls in my boarding house, Bad Behaviour also grapples with the changing shape of my relationship with my parents during that year as I felt increasingly lonely and isolated from them, and how, as an adult, I have fallen out with my mother as she struggles to accept me being gay.
I don’t know if my book has upset my parents, or if it has, to cite Donleavy, made them drop dead with shame. I presume my mother has not read the book, though I have been told she has read a review of it, and I have not asked my dad because I don’t wish to upset him, or cause more anxiety around my relationship with Mum.
I am aware how absurd it sounds: that I can’t bring myself to ask my own father if he has read my first book, an object of great toil and even greater pride. But there you have it. This is what memoir can be: a scalpel to a sore.
In fact, this is what I like most about the Donleavy quote: how it reveals, simply and with a degree of sharp comedy, the risky nature of memoir writing. How it can take you all the way back to childhood, and how dangerous this expedition can be not only for you but also for your relationships with others – especially your family.
Shame is one of the emotions I have grappled with most profoundly in my life, and in my writing. Lately, I have wondered if shame is an emotion women memoirists suffer from more acutely than our male counterparts. In my experience, talking to many fellow female writers, and reading their work, it seems to be so. Is it because many of us are taught from a young age that, as good girls, we must never speak out? That we shouldn’t criticise, complain or rebel? That we should be quiet and calm and respect the boundaries of public and private?
This kind of attitude never manifested in my family when I grew up. My father encouraged my interests, my learning and my intellect, as did my mother. I was taught to express myself, that my ideas were valued and valuable, and, above all, that my experience mattered. When I look back, I can now see that shame in fact first worked its way into my consciousness when I went away to boarding school, and then again, more severely, when I struggled with my own sexuality, and finally when I sat down and began my memoir.
There is, of course, a certain amount of irony in writing about family, seeking to better understand these relationships, only to find yourself further away from your loved ones. But even when I wrote about life outside my family, things became sensitive with my parents. My Dad had, as I expected, articulated apprehension and some disapproval after he read a chapter-in-progress of Bad Behaviour – he was, after all, a former school principal.
‘The school aren’t going to like it,’ he warned over the phone.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘the book will be more nuanced than you’re making it out.’
‘I wouldn’t say it’s nuanced,’ he replied.
I felt enraged by his response. Why was he so quick to judge? Why couldn’t he comprehend how necessary it was for me to write this book, and how bound up reflecting on my own experiences was in better understanding other people in my life, including him and Mum? But I soon came to realise that it is futile to seek that acceptance from the subjects of your own writing – and perhaps unfair on them, too. If the shoe were on the other foot, how would I feel? Uncomfortable, certainly. For Dad, I believe he felt in this instance that writing about myself was somehow an act of rebellion against him and my mother, a veiled exercise in criticism.
Once the nerves around my book’s release had abated, I began to reflect on the process of writing it and my relationship to my story. I realised that the act of writing had become problematic (in my head, at least, full of anxiety and stress) because in this book I sought to ask questions about shared and unpleasant experiences in my boarding school and at home – experiences for a long time I didn’t wholly believe I had the right to tell.
But when the writing was finished and the book was out there on the shelves, I was surprised by the new, fierce and unwavering sense of ownership of my story that I felt, and a kind of renewed loyalty to my own experiences, to my own sense of truth, and to myself. Suddenly all that worry, all that fear, had disappeared. I felt whole again.
But my anxiety around my parents has persisted. That belief that I had disappointed them by telling my story. That I had rebelled. That I had done the wrong thing. It’s a curious feeling, and one that will perhaps fade over time – but now, less than a year on, it does still feel raw.
As I wrote earlier, being uncertain about her story’s ownership might be female writer’s peculiarity. Maybe we feel this way because we have never really had any ownership of history, and by virtue of that, any ownership of our own stories. As women writers, I believe we are still struggling for cultural legitimacy. In Australia, as the Stella Count (an annual count of statistics compiled by the Stella Prize to reveal the ratio of books by men and women reviewed in major Australian newspapers and literary review publications) demonstrates each year, women’s writing continues to be under-represented in literary-review space and prizes.
Similarly, women’s writing is often overlooked in our education system. In NSW, for instance, fewer than 14% of HSC texts are written by women while in my home state Victoria, books by male writers make up 68% of the English text list.
I think a large part of my initial lack of confidence in the telling of my story came from the belief I’d had as a younger person that I’d never actually write a book, let alone a memoir. Like many aspiring writers today, I studied creative writing at university. I loved almost everything about the course: the teachers were engaging, the prescribed readings insightful and provocative, and the workshops were safe and temperate spaces. But there were some exercises I hated; they left me sitting under the fluorescent lights of our classroom, mouth agape, my mind utterly blank. Those were memoirwriting exercises.
‘Write about your childhood,’ our tutor instructed. ‘Write about your first memory. Your worst memory. Your best memory.’ As I sat there, glumly observing my peers scratching away, I thought to myself that there was nothing about my life, my experiences, that could form the basis of an interesting story. Jessica Mitford’s governess’s famous words pinged around my head: ‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it.’
But it did turn out that I had a story to tell – it just took me many years to find the courage to write it.
Bad Behaviour details my experiences at a remote boarding school campus – ‘Silver Creek’ I call it – at the foot of the Victorian Alps. The school is famous for its outdoor education program. At Silver Creek we went running most afternoons in the surrounding bush, ten to 15 kilometres at a time. Weekends were spent hiking in small groups. Other times, we skied, rogained, abseiled and white-water rafted. My story focuses largely on the relationships I formed within my house, a Spartan wooden hut at furthest edge of the campus,
where I lived with 15 other girls, as well as on the growing emotional distance I felt from my parents during this year away.
From the very first night at Silver Creek, I felt horribly homesick. I missed my parents desperately – especially my mother. I was also constantly afraid of the other girls, and desperate to fit in, and all this contributed to my growing attraction to the dominant girls in the house. And, to my horror, I found myself participating in bullying. Later in the year, the same friends I had aligned myself with began to bully me. The memoir examines my complicity, and occasional outright aggression, and the complicated acknowledgement of this disturbing change in my behaviour.
But who wants to remember being a 14-year-old – especially one who carried around so much shame and fear? And who really wants to reveal all the darkness of their own personality? Still, I felt compelled to dig up those unpleasant memories.
Joan Didion, in her essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, writes:
‘I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.’
Just like Didion’s uninvited guests, my teenage self still plagued me. She had trailed me into adulthood like a stowaway, and now she was getting in the way of me growing up, of finding love and happiness, and also coming to understand these shadowy events from the past. So writing Bad Behaviour was a little like getting to know myself again, as well as the people who played a large role in my life as a teenager, including my parents. But it wasn’t only the teenage years that were significant. My early twenties were influential too. Didion has a similar experience. Though she likes her 17-year-old self:
‘The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.’
I can relate to this. I hear many friends describe the angst of their teenage years, and while my adolescence was no walk in the park, the years of greatest unhappiness and conflicted family relationships were in my early twenties. This was a time when I was coming to terms with my sexuality, battling loneliness at university, and beginning to feel particularly estranged from my mother, who didn’t seem willing to understand or accept me.
When I began writing my book about three years ago, it was difficult to reengage with that particular self, even though she was recent past – harder, even, than it was to reengage with the 14-year-old. But I also felt more assertive in the writing of the memories from my early twenties – the act of writing them became an act of empowerment. I couldn’t change the past, but I managed the way I related it.
There is always a nagging moral quandary, however, when writing about other people. In my experience it is rare to find someone wholly comfortable with being represented on the page – I know many of my friends who, while pleased my book was published, were uneasy about how they might come across in the story.
Many people have asked if there were times when I wanted to fictionalise my story. Wouldn’t it have been easier, they wondered. It may have eased my father’s anxieties, but I believe the same concerns were sure to arise anyway, just as Ceridwen Dovey, author of the genre-defying book Only The Animals, reflected in her excellent article ‘The Pencil and the Damage Done’ in The Monthly in November 2014:
‘And what of the pact between author and subject? The way in which autobiographical fiction is framed simultaneously as ‘art’ and ‘truth’ seems to cause further injury to authors’ subjects and intimates… In this sense, authors of autobiographical fiction are operating outside any pact of contract with their intimates, unlike the authors of autobiography, who are still expected – by subjects, readers, critics – to adhere to basic standards of truthfulness.’
In any case, I couldn’t write my story as fiction. For me, the act of writing a memoir was important to the process. If I’d written my experiences as fiction, I would have been hiding behind the genre, and that would have been self-defeating, less courageous, and less honest.
What I have also come to realise since Bad Behaviour has been published is that while I might have had control over my story as it appeared on the page, I have absolutely no control over the way it is read, and the commentary that surrounds it.
Just before my book’s publication, my partner and I went away for the weekend. It was supposed to be a short holiday of total relaxation by the beach. Swimming and cooking and drinking wine and playing Pictionary.
And no talking about The Book.
The first morning, we went on a walk through the lush countryside, past ponies grazing in field and the sun shining down from high in the sky. I checked my phone. I had a couple of messages from my work friends, telling me there was a review of the book in the Fairfax papers.
I was very pleased with it – the review actually brought tears to my eyes, because it felt like a tender and generous engagement with the work. But this joy was soon tempered by feelings of unease. The review, which as well as describing the girls I lived with as ‘rancid’, had identified astutely the most emotionally significant figure in the book: my mother.
It might sound unbelievable, but only at that moment of reading the review did the implications of writing my book hit home. While I could not take back my words (and nor did I want to), I realised there was nothing I could do about the pain my memoir might cause people I wrote about, particularly my mother and father.
One girl I wrote about in Bad Behaviour, Sarah – who was one of the powerful girls in our dormitory and was eventually expelled from the school – wrote to me on Twitter, a medium not renowned for its nuance, soon after the book’s publication. Quite pithily, she wanted to know if I’d considered how the real-life girls would feel reading about themselves and their experiences.
It was a fair question. It’s perhaps the biggest ethical question a memoirist faces: how to write other people’s experiences when it portrays them in an unflattering light?
I spent a very uncomfortable day turning over her message in my mind. But it wasn’t her I was concerned about, it was my mother. After all that pain, part of me still felt like I had betrayed her in revealing publicly her disapproval of me.
Thinking about all this set me on edge. Events were nerve-wracking – I was always waiting for someone in the audience to reveal themselves as one of the Silver Creek girls and confront me. Or, worse, I worried that my mother would turn up at one of the events and I would have to somehow perform with her there.
I hope that my parents will read my book in the future and recognise that I didn’t write it so they would drop dead with shame. But I won’t be holding my breath for that day, either.
Didion writes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem that all writers are ruthless. I disagree. I think memoirists, particularly, are often searching for some kind of light as well as feelings of affection and, at times, deep love for their subjects, but to do so they must disrupt some of their closest and most significant relationships. Sometimes this disruption causes pain, and is misconstrued. Other times it can bring you closer to those you write about.
Since my book has been out, I have found ways of communicating better with my father, and I’m not sure I would have been capable of that before. So although telling my story may have seemed like rebellion to him when I first started writing, I was not really writing to rebel at all, but rather seeking to understand him and my mother, and how my experiences as a child had come to shape me later in life.
LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS IN AUSTRALIA
SILVIA KWON
I came to Australia when I was nine, in 1977, with my parents and two brothers, from Seoul. South Korea had begun to prosper after a war, but many of its people, if they had a chance to emigrate, did so.
We arrived here in the middle of the night with only a handful of suitcases, no furniture and little money. Within a matter of hours, we found ourselves marooned in a strange terrain of English-speaking Westerners, having only each other to rely on, figuring out our new world like a puzzle to be solved collectively, and individually. Consequently, the ties that bind us as a family became tighter and, from my perspective, more constraining.
Although it was not altogether an unhappy time, as we revelled in many things – open spaces, clean air, houses with backyards, all sorts of epicurean luxuries we could actually afford, like bananas, chocolate and meat – it was clear to me that my parents were not happy. For them, it seemed the notion of happiness was almost irrelevant, as their lives were not about them, but the children.
As I grew older, I didn’t like being at home, with its stifling environment circumscribed by expectations of getting ahead financially and of academic achievement and unspoken unhappiness. My parents’ marriage wasn’t good and their relationship worked best when my father worked away from home, on construction sites for lengthy periods of time, as he had done in their early years together when my mother was able to peacefully raise the children without worrying about him. But when we migrated to Australia, he was around a lot more and his moods cast an awful pall over the household. His temper at times turned violent. He would upend tables and smash furniture, and these unexpected outbursts made us nervous and wary for many days afterwards. It was like living with a time-bomb, as we tried to anticipate the next time he would strike out. My parents had no idea – perhaps owing to the difficulty of their early lives and also because of their high tolerance for hardship – that their suffering was adversely affecting me and my brothers. From their point of view, we children were lucky to have such hardworking, self-sacrificing parents.
