what's a memory?

It begins:

There once was a small boy called Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and what's more he wasn't very old either.

Have you read it? This most beautiful story is about a little boy who lives next door to an old folks' home, and whose favourite old lady there - Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper - has lost her memory.

He asks all the people in the old folks' home, What's a memory?

Their answers are cryptic, ethereal, esoteric, even contradictory. It's something that makes you laugh, something that makes you cry. It's something as precious as gold. But, armed with their advice, practical Wilfrid sets off to gather some memories for Miss Nancy, because she has lost her own.

Perfectly written by Mem Fox, this one will break your heart in the best way possible. Wilfrid Gordon might seem to approach memory loss and Alzheimer's disease in a naive, childlike way - and he does! - but this book shows the wonderful way that some memories don't have to stay lost, the way objects can be significant and imbued with meaning and just how important it is to make connections with other people - and not just those from your generation. This is how stories are made, and so I hold Wilfrid Gordon close to remind me.

But don't forget the illustrations! You couldn't if you tried... Julie Vivas is some kind of magical watercolour genius. Her pictures bring the story to life in a way that I don't believe anyone else quite could. And it's not just this book, but the others too: The Very Best of Friends, Let the Celebrations Begin, The Tram to Bondi Beach, and of course Possum Magic*. I love her soft colours and distinctive style, I love the droopy socks, I love her chooks.

I don't remember first being read Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, but my childhood edition has an inscription:

 To dear Kate
Happy Christmas 1985
Love from Mum and Dad

Meanwhile, pictured here is a first edition copy of this, my favourite book. I was given it as a present for my recent, milestoneish birthday by some wonderful friends. It's an old memory, now wrapped in a new one.

*Possum Magic and I are the same age and, as such, share a strong connection ... though Wilfrid Gordon is my true favourite.

90s YA classics

Come, gather round, ye young adults of the 1990s! What were the the stories you leafed through during your painful adolescences? These were some of the significant titles of mine:

People Might Hear You (Robin Klein) Frances' aunt and guardian has married a man who belongs to a religious cult and soon Frances is literally locked inside a big house and forced to live - and frightened into living - by their restrictive rules. This is one that's as powerful on my 32nd reading as it was on the first. The powerlessness that she feels, the same feeling that Professer Umbridge evokes in The Order of the Phoenix ... shudder.

Steven Herrick's Love, ghosts and nose hair. Probably the first verse novel I read and still one of my favourites. And its sequel A Place Like This. Guitar Highway Rose, which I've blathered on about in the past. Not to mention After January, by Nick Earls: the best in-between-school-and-the-real-world novel, and which you can read about here and here.

Cried my way through Peeling the Onion, about karate champion Anna and the trauma she goes through following a terrible car accident. Wendy Orr's book is wonderfully written - the descriptions of Anna's pain and the ways she shows how Anna's accident affects the rest of the family, and her friendships. Caused me anguish, but gives us all hope!

And Isobelle Carmody's terrifying The Gathering, which our grade 6 teacher Mrs Chappell read to us and we sneaked in during lunch to read ahead ... and we read ahead to chapter 26 when the terrible, awful, sickening thing happens. The stench of Cheshunt, the frightening Kraken and the group of mysterious misfits that Nathanial meets - it's a story of good and evil, light and dark. It's that brilliant mix of real world and paranormal that grabs you and draws you in, almost against your will.

Before David Levithan and Rachel Cohn paired up to write their dual-narrative books, Gary Crew and Libby Hathorn wrote Dear Venny, Dear Saffron, which tells the story of bogan Vinny and New York City artist Saffy, who begin exchanging letters and we follow their stories over a couple of years and all the amazing highs and devastating lows of their lives.

There were others: Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get A Life (Maureen McCarthy), and Margaret Clark's ridonkulous backlist, Joanne Horniman's Loving Athena, Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith. Letters from the Inside and Tomorrow, When the War Began (all of John Marsden's, actually), Touching Earth Lightly by Margo Lanagan, Phillip Gwynne's Deadly, Unna?, Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg. I think this is a list to be continued. Watch this space.

When I read books now I try to think of what my teenage self would think. It's harder than it seems. I'm more of a cynic now, and I don't read YA in order to experience things (which i think is one of the greatest strengths of YA). Perhaps there's a sense of nostalgia. How lucky was I to have a bookseller for a Mama Bear?

Memory Lane, The Basics*






*oh Gotye. I'm still "looking over my shoulder" for you to come back to The Basics. *UPDATE* The Basics show at the Empress on 22nd July was the best thing - thank you Wally, for obviously reading this blog and putting the show on for me. Or the Empress's 25th bday, whatever.

The Tillermans

Maybe life was like the sea, and all the people were like boats ... Or maybe each boat was a kind of family. Then, what kind of boat would the Tillermans be? A little one, bobbling about, with the mast fallen off? A grubby, worn-down workboat, with Dicey hanging on to the rudder for dear life.
  Everybody who was born was coast on to the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats - they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbour.

Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, first published in 1981, is one of those quintessential classic American children's books. Or at least one of those thick-paged, yellowing novels from the 1970s and 80s that have the same feel, the same smell, the same dorky, now-dated cover illustrations. The characters and the worlds they inhabit are small, but the stories are so rich. I don't feel like the authors are trying to impress me with how cool the characters are, but the focus is on creating relationships that ring true, that tell stories of sadness without being shocking or depressing, that capture a little bit of a life so fully.

Dicey and her brothers and sister (James, Sammy and Maybeth) are abandoned by their mother and find themselves alone in a car park in a strange city. When she doesn't come back Dicey decides they will walk to Bridgeport, where they had been headed before their mother left them, to go and stay with a relative there. Within a few pages you know these children so well and your heart fairly breaks for them as they hope to find their Momma waiting for them in Bridgeport.

There's a lot of walking involved, a lot of trudging, lots of stale donuts eaten and every penny they can get their hands on can go five ways. As the children walk, they talk about their Momma - who clearly became a very sad woman unable to care for her family - they sing together and they form an unbreakable unit. When Bridgeport doesn't turn out the way they expected, the Tillermans head off again, in search of an estranged, eccentric grandmother.

This review made me so sad. Of course we're not all going to like the same stories etc etc, and the books have more supporters than critics on Goodreads so I shouldn't complain, but at least try to tell me what made you stop reading.

Homecoming definitely has a wholesome whiff about it, for sure, but in a way that acknowledges and appreciates the dark side of the world and doesn't dismiss it or run away from it. All the children (and most of the grown-ups) learn about right and wrong, about what's important in life - and learn that all these things are difficult and changeable and confusing. The people that the Tillermans encounter on their travels, and the kindness (and cruelty) of strangers, the sea motif and the ideas of home and family all make for the best kind of book, in my opinion.

Homecoming's sequel, Dicey's Song, won the Newbery Medal in 1983.

The Tillerman Cycle: Dicey's Song, A Solitary Blue, The Runner, Sons from Afar, Come a Stranger, Seventeen Against the Dealer.

butch aggie

night noises, written by mem fox & illustrated by terry denton (originally published 1989)

do you remember this book? i adore it*, because it combines two of my favourite things: old people and dogs.

the old lady, lily laceby - of droopy stockings and whispy hair - is snoozing by the fire and dreaming about her past. meanwhile her dog, butch aggie, is hearing some strange noises coming from outside - but lily laceby doesn't wake up.

if you haven't read it, please don't worry - lily laceby does wake up and the night noises are just all of lily laceby's friends and family coming to wish her a happy 90th birthday!

yesterday we celebrated my little granny's 91st birthday with homemade curry for lunch and a pink cake and heated discussion about politics and a game of croquet on the lawn (the little granny got quite ferocious and competitive).

and my parents' youngest dog - our very own aggie - has some of these:

*in spite of the font used on the cover...

"a thin bat's squeak of sexuality"

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945).

This book is hilarious, romantic and also, disappointingly, a little bit rubbish. I loved the social satire (fits on my shelf with Nancy Mitford), I loved the critique and the sadness of the crumbling classes, and the homoerotic relationships ... and the language! It is divine! I dog-eared all the pages and underlined all the lines.

The story opens to Charles Ryder as a middle-aged army captain, who happens to be stationed at a big country house during WWII - called Brideshead. But! It is not Charles' first time here, and we are then swept back into his memories of being a young man and in the company of the enigmatic and ever-so-slightly troubled Sebastian Flyte.

Just the place to bury a crock of gold,' said Sebastian. 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.'

...I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.

Sebastian is much devoted to Aloysius, his teddy bear. How this made me laugh! A teddy bear driving a car?! What ho! Sebastian writes in a letter to Charles:

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

All the interactions between Sebastian and Charles are charged with sexual energy, lots of references to lips and faces. But Charles is drawn to Sebastian's sister Lady Julia, too. When he first meets her (rushing to the sickbed of Sebastian, who has actually only sprained an ankle) she asks him to light her a cigarette:

It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.

But he feels peace when not with Julia. Is it because their love overwhelms him? Charles is a bit of a softy. Also, it is obvious he is in love with Sebastian.

But years later, a now alcoholic and mostly useless Sebastian having floated off to North Africa, Charles is returning to England via a fancy cruise ship from a painting trip he took in South America. Here, he and Julia succumb to their mutual love over the course of a couple of days, while the ship is buffeted by very rough seas and poor Charles' wife is seasick and in bed. These scenes on the ship are wonderful. Surreal, almost, and romantic.

Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one.

And they are a little hilarious. When Charles' (cheating) wife is seasick he unsympathetically describes her suite as a maternity ward and she is so wan and pathetic when she receives a bouquet of flowers:

as though the game were a private misfortune of her own for which the world in its love was condoling with her ... my wife seemed to make a sacred, female rite even of seasickness.

Then, especially towards the end of the novel, religion becomes (well, it was a theme throughout but really dug itself in here for the long haul) a big part of it - and ruins the story for me. According to the notes at the front of the book, Evelyn Waugh became a devoted Catholic and this book is kind of a hodgepodge that he wrote in a very short amount of time, which represents his conversion. But it made the story so unsatisfying for me: so C and J can't be together because she is too much of a sinner? And poor, poor Sebastian who thinks he is mad, or has indeed gone mad, and has gone to live with monks/priests? No one seemed to be happy, they had happiness but they threw it away because of Catholicism. So strike me down and call me sacrilegious but I could have done without this part, Evelyn.

I enjoyed A Handful of Dust more. But that is for another day. Tell me, what did you think of this one? What am I missing? Am I just a sucker for a happy ending?

"i prefer stories about squalor"

THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun - or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.

With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left - the wet - hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and - it was the fifth or sixth ring - picked up the phone.

~A Perfect Day for Bananafish, JD Salinger

At the risk of being a total cliché hipster doofus*, I hereby proclaim my love and awe and adoration for the short stories of Mr Salinger. He can create atmosphere and character like nobody's business, like in the piece above. He can write dialogue that leaps sprightly from the page, at once being mere banter while also ringing with subtext.


Salinger often wrote about young people, about teenagers and innocence and experience. His story For Esmé - With Love and Squalor breaks my heart every time. Like Sybil in Bananafish Esmé and her small brother Charles** are beautiful foils to the damaged adult to whom they speak and with whom they interact. Perhaps they can't save them, but sometimes they can.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac - with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

I think I prefer his short stories to The Catcher in the Rye (eek! the Catcher cult will be after me!), possibly because there are more of them, and I adore the Glass family. Also because, taken as a whole, they give the reader such a fascinating peek at America in the 50s and the middle and upper classes as they existed post-war. He can make you laugh and break your heart all in the space of twelve or so pages. How's that for inspiration? And emotional squalor.


*See the film (500) Days of Summer - "just because someone likes the same bizarro crap you do doesn't mean you're soulmates." (This line even delivered by the film's own version of Holden Caulfield's kid sister Phoebe)
**The evil sister and I often recite to one another, with great amusement: HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHALES.

old wine is good wine

Finding Grace, by Alyssa Brugman

Grace had a brain injury. That's just how she was.
She spent a lot of time sitting in her leather wing-backed chair just staring out the window. I didn't really know what was happening inside her head and I didn't really think about it.
I was eighteen and knew everything. Well, not everything, but I did know a great deal about a great many things. For example, I knew that time healed most wounds and those that it didn't you simply got used to.
That was before I met Grace or Mr Alistair Preston.

Rachel, just after finishing high school, gets a job as a live-in carer for a woman named Grace, who has an acquired brain injury. Grace can walk and eat, but Rachel has to make sure she goes to the loo, has to put her to bed and make sure she doesn't hurt herself.

At first Grace scares Rachel, with her blank stare, slack lips and drool, but soon Rachel comes to realise there is still someone in there, that Grace hasn't disappeared completely. It's so beautiful, every time I read this, to watch Rachel learn and question herself and her understanding of the world.

Mr Preston is Grace's lawyer, he's the one who picked Rachel. When he comes around he speaks to Grace lovingly, buys her shoes and very good wine - he doesn't treat her like everyone else does. His dedication and guilt and grief is heartbreaking.
Rachel is hilarious. She sings out loud as she walks down the street, uses a snorkel in her car because the windows hardly open and the radiator blows coolant in through the vents, she blushes horribly (frack - her attempts to hide the blush from the handsome boy she meets in her first uni lecture - I couldn't laugh enough!) and has an extremely unique perspective. I love her.

Mama Bear sent me this the year after I finished school, when I was working in Scotland, and it was so wonderful that I couldn't bear to part with it and it became part of the massive haul I brought with me when I came back. I don't remember when I met Alyssa Brugman, but I must have, and I also must have told her that story.

If you have not yet read this remarkable novel, then shame on you. Get thee to a library (or a bookshop). It has a very pretty new cover, which looks like this:

published by Allen&Unwin in 2006

woah! book time machine!

the literary delorean has hit 88 and i've travelled back in time to 1987.

space demons, gillian rubenstein (omnibus)

i was in primary school when i first read space demons. i remember being totally enthralled, completely engrossed and i believed in this story 100%. it was with unbridled glee that i reread this series just last month.

i rejoined the spoiled and selfish andrew as he receives this cutting-edge japanese prototype computer game from his father and as he bullies his friend ben into playing - even after the game sucks ben into the computer the first time he plays.

but as the friends continue to play space demons, and as two other kids from school get involved - the new girl in town elaine and the bad boy mario - the game gets dark and frightening as it feeds on anger and fear. shadows start to appear to the children in their real lives and threaten to overtake them and their own behaviour changes with the game.

the book encourages kindness and positivity, working together. it also explores parental fighting and divorce, sibling rivalry, bullying and single parents. i was surprised that the descriptions didn't seem to be as vivid as i remember - and wonder (sadly) whether my imagination has taken a beating in the intervening years. the language is straightforward, the pace is quick, at times the dialogue is kind of stilted and the issues are dealt with in a relatively heavy-handed way. also, it's written in the omniscient voice, but also at times an alternating 3rd person, which came across now as kind of clunky. however, i think it's important to note that i didn't notice these things when i was a child - only now going back to it.

this book was published in the 80s and is actually pretty hilarious to read now, what with all its talk of joysticks and dial-up modems and other outdated computer terms. the kids talk about how amazing and revolutionary the graphics are and i'm just amazed at what a mind gillian rubenstein had - and how the characters from space demons would freak out if they saw the games available now. i'd actually really like to see that. maybe there should be another sequel?

space demons is followed by the equally fantastic skymaze and shinkei. and now they come in one nifty book.

it was pretty popular...
Winner Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award 1987
Winner Children’s Literature Peace Prize, 1987
Winner S.A. Festival National Children’s Book Award 1987
Winner YABBA Awards Fiction for Older Readers, 1990

gillian rubenstein lives here