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Growing up as a Mormon, postnatal psychosis and an expat’s love of Australia feature in these memoirs.
WORDS VICTORIA CAREY
Strange Little Girl by Jessica Knight
When Jessica Knight was born in Shepparton Hospital, Victoria, the first child of her recently married Mormon parents, there’s no doubt she was a much-wanted arrival. “When my grandmother came to see me, I was in my mother’s arms. She looked at my grandmother and said, ‘Thank you for having me so I could have Jessica’.”
A few days after her birth, they returned home to a dairy farm in rural Victoria, though without any answers to her “medical riddles”. So, while her parents carried out the milking, baby Jessica was put in a cot in the dairy’s tank room, soothed to sleep by the sound of milk rushing into the vats.
It’s the start of a childhood punctuated with regular hospital stays, including surgery for acute scoliosis, and a constant barrage of medical tests. Jessica, who had a one-woman show, Mormon Girl, in 2019 at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, describes her experience of growing up in country Australia with wry humour.
This is not a book where you will find superfluous phrases employed for no other reason than to show off. Every word in this considered and beautifully written memoir deserves its place on the page.
Swimming Home by Judy Cotton
Once Vogue Australia’s long-time New York contributor, this journalist and artist wrote her first book when she was 80. (It gives me hope!)
Born in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Judy left when she was only two, though memories of its red dirt remain strong. The majority of her childhood was spent in Oberon, where her mother Eve bred sheep and her father, Sir Robert Cotton, began his political career campaigning against Ben Chifley for the seat of Macquarie. Sent as a four-year-old to boarding school in Orange, she returned for a much-loved stint to the local school in Oberon.
Sydney, South Korea, Japan and finally New York were to follow, and it’s the latter where she settled.
Judy’s complicated relationship with her mother is central and she writes beautifully about Eve’s final days. “How will I live without her frail, ironclad spirit determining that I wear this not that, should or shouldn’t say this, should eat this; ‘a little sugar is good for you’.”
Drawn from notes made over the years and hidden in a drawer, I’m glad this beautifully crafted memoir has seen the light of day.
Because I’m Not Myself, You See by Ariane Beeston
Fans of Lewis Carroll will no doubt immediately recognise the title from Alice in Wonderland: “I’m afraid I can’t explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?” But this memoir is far from a fairy tale.
A psychologist and child protection worker when she gives birth to her first child, Ariane tries to keep her delusions hidden from family and friends before she is finally admitted to a mother and baby psychiatric unit.
It’s just the beginning of her journey through postnatal psychosis. Ariane skilfully navigates her account of this difficult time in her life.
Today she works at the Centre of Perinatal Excellence (COPE) and is determined to make sure her experience helps others.
Jackie is passionate about rural communities and wants to champion the local vendors she used on her special day.
When she first started the event in 2019, Jackie had no idea it would turn into a national network for rural women to connect, collaborate and celebrate.
Whether it’s fiction or real life, these stories are of women choosing their own path. By Victoria Carey.
Everyday drama — from divorce to droving to a mysterious death — comes to life in these new novels and memoirs, reviewed by Victoria Carey.
Victoria Carey reviews a selection of the latest fiction and non-fiction.
