Monthly Archives: Oct 2026

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? at the book group

Posted on 21 Oct 2026 | 3 comments

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Mariner Books 2013)

Before the meeting: When I was unexpectedly designated to be Chooser this month. I turned to my to-be-read shelf for a relatively quick read, and found Are You My Mother? It’s a comic, so can be read fairly quickly. I’d loved the two Alison Bechdel books I’d read previously. What could go wrong? I recommended it, and only then started reading it. Almost immediately I regretted my decision, but it was pointed out to me on WhatsApp that the rules of the Book Group make no provision for regrets or withdrawals. I did suggest, meekly, that people might like look at either Fun Home or Spent (links are to my blogposts) as supplementary readings.

So why did I get cold feet?

We-e-e-ll. One of the things I loved about the other two books was their complexity. They are both hugely intertextual: their largely autobiographical narratives are interwoven with motifs from classical myth, modern literature and social theory; many frames include drawings of piles of books with titles visible; some frames include painstakingly drawn text – from people’s letters or from books. Both books treat gender and sexuality with great nuance, as well as humour. The narrative style switches back and forth in time, and there are often moments when the captions tell one story while the images tell another, and the relationship between the two is not glaringly obvious. In both, the process of writing the book is part of the narrative.

Beginning with a title taken from a famous children’s picture book, Are You My Mother? has all those virtues, but it takes them to a whole other level. The epigraph from Virginia Woolf is fair warning: ‘For nothing was simply one thing.’

The book’s subject is Alison’s relationship to her mother. (In this blog post I refer to Alison as the main character and Bechdel as the creator. It’s only fair to assume that they are not absolutely the same person!) Alison goes to a string of therapists and reads a lot of psychoanalytic theory. She gets interested in Donald Winnicott and the book interweaves the story of his life and some of his theory with Alison’s story. All of that is interesting, but when Alison’s introspection gets caught up in the weeds of psychoanalytic jargon, not just Winnicott’s but also Freud’s, Lacan’s and Alice Miller’s, it becomes overwhelming. I got fixated on the word cathexis and the related verb to cathect. I still don’t know what they mean and I’m past caring. Where the dream that kicks off Spent is brilliantly comic (a woman leaps naked from her bed and shoots out the window at an attacking tiger), the dreams that start each section of this book just reinforce the truism about about other people’s dreams being boring (see discussion of page 79 below). And the recursive stuff about writing the book we are now reading gets way beyond a joke.

It’s not terrible, far from it. Winnicott is the creator of one of my favourite sentences about human beings: ‘There’s no such thing as a baby, there’s always a baby and someone,’ so I was interested to learn more about his theories and his life (his life was, um, weird, but he was great with young children). I was interested to learn more about Alice Miller’s thinking. I’ve heard people talk about the mirror phase of child development: now I think I know what it is. And – most importantly – the actual narrative about Alison’s childhood is engaging.

Alison’s mother emerges as an interesting character – because she’s an amateur actor, there are lots of enjoyable theatre scenes. And there are wonderful bits of straightforward family life, which I am happy to read as ‘simply one thing’, whatever Virginia Woolf might say. Here’s a more or less random page, page 169:

OK, so it’s not one thing. It’s about language, gender, sexuality, the mother-daughter relationship. And if you look at what the images are doing, you also see that young Alison is alone at one end of the tub while her brothers play together at the other end, and Alison’s facial expression in the final frame is eloquent. Also notice Bechdel’s characteristic use of non-male-gazey nudity (there’s quite a lot of adult female nudity in the book). This page is rich, emotionally engaging story-telling, and that’s true of much of the book. The subtle use of colour is also characteristic.

I was going to leave it there, but I feel bound to my practice of looking at page 79*. In this book, page 79 is part of the dream that starts Chapter Three, which has the Winnicott-derived title ‘True and False Self’.

The current therapist comes to Alison’s office, where, dreamlike, it’s no big deal that Alison is not wearing pants. The therapist massages her neck and shoulders, finishes briskly, and, on this page, takes her trousers away to mend them.

It turns out on the following pages that Alison has been reading Jung, and at her next therapy session expounds on her own interpretation of the dream. The therapist gives her interpretation. Transference is mentioned, and there’s a dubiously relevant quote from Winnicott’s paper, ‘Ego Distortions in Terms of True and False Self’. A number of frames tell a story, presumably a memory, of Alison’s mother patching her jeans, but without matching the colour. Which somehow leads to a scene where her mother asks young Alison if she loves her, and Alison feels put on the spot as no one in their family ever talks like that. And so it goes.

Maybe it’s a book that would reward rereading, even study. On first reading, it’s far too convoluted and recursive for my ageing brain.

Just before the meeting: I chatted about the book with a therapist friend, who said that most of the bits of the book I quoted to her were standard psychological theory. In the course of the conversation, I opened to a number of pages at random and found, to my mild surprise, that every page had something interesting going on. Evidently it’s a good book to dip back into.

The meeting: Sadly, the only member of the Group who couldn’t come is the only one who is well versed in psych theory. Nevertheless, we had an excellent eclectic meal and a rich conversation, much of which was about Alison Bechdel’s books. Among us we had read Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and Spent, though no one had read all four. No one had read Dykes to Watch Out For, though someone had sighted it in a bookshop.

Impossible to summarise the conversation! A couple of chaps had an almost visceral reaction against psychobabble (my word), which made Are You My Mother? pretty much unreadable. One man spoke eloquently about Fun Home, in particular how moving he found its final movement. Spent, on the other hand, he found diverting but lacking depth. We spent some time admiring the artwork, and the sometimes complex relationship between image and text. One man felt he was seeing things he had no business seeing – he was partly talking about the sex scenes (especially, someone said, the toe-sucking) but also the intensely private introspection.

When someone said they were irritated by Alison’s self-absorption, someone else floated the idea that she (the character) was being sent up, seen as slightly ridiculous. If you look at the expressions on the faces of her succession of therapists, it was suggested, you see that they are pretty irritated by her as well. The question of how funny the book is was left open. (I think those who had read Spent agreed that it’s unambiguously funny.

Someone named a phenomenon that I have experienced, though not with this book. He said he just read it. That is, he was never engaged, but had it all pass before him like an interesting object that made no personal meaning. My guess is that this was about the medium – maybe comics ask to be read using different faculties from the ones used to read straightforward text. As a counter example, someone held up a spread in Fun Home that consisted of maybe 20 almost identical images of two characters in the front seat of a car and spoke of how well that scene caught the awkward conversation between the father and his adult daughter.

I don’t imagine that Alison Bechdel created this book with the explicit intention of having it discussed by a rowdy group of old, white, mainly straight men. But I don’t think she would have minded our conversation.

All the members of the Book Group are men of settler heritage. We met and I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Ender Başkan’s Two Hundred Million Musketeers

Posted on 16 Oct 2026 | Leave a comment

Ender Başkan, Two Hundred Million Musketeers (Giramondo 2025)

This book won the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. I imagine the judging panel having a great time sitting around the table reading aloud to each other.

The book’s nineteen poems flow like a river in spate, swerving from subject to subject, but keeping control. Most of them are in short lines with no punctuation apart from an occasional question mark, slash or exclamation mark, as if the poet is too busy to pay attention to such fiddly stuff, but lets the line breaks and rhythm do the punctuation work. I found myself reading fast, as if riding a wave.

The first poem comes with ungainly title, ‘Here Is The Shirt, (Get) Off My Back / Swimming In The Afternoon’. Possibly because I currently spend a fair amount of time with young grandchildren, I was in thrall from its opening lines:

if you want an alarm clock to work 
make sure you 
place it out of reach 
but never mind 
our mutual friends are awake and so are we 
549am 
i am dad 
im on demand 
raaah-biiiish truuuuuuck! 
i run out to see the bin flung up and over 
with you

Life is rich and full, and who needs alarm clocks?

In this poem and the rest of the book the poet’s two young daughters emerge as fully loveable characters. I wonder how they’d get on with the two young girls who are similarly alive and interesting in Toby Fitch’s ‘Morning Walks in a Time of Plague’ (blogged about by me at this link).

As well as the arduous joys of parenthood, poems deal with work in a bookshop – ‘Erotics of Bookselling’ puts that work front and centre, but it’s often there incidentally. The poet travels with his family to his native Türkiye, celebrates his Melbourne neighbours, makes his political affiliations clear, grapples with the migrant experience, all with tremendous vitality and wit. A couple of lines in ‘Hot Water’ (on page 48) might stand in as a general description:

and the poem is a psychic luna park of associations
that just come when the soil is ready

Page 79* is the fourth of seven pages of the poem ‘Monolingualism Swamp’. That title may sound ominous, but there’s nothing ponderous or strident about the poem itself. The poet and his family are in Türkiye, he enjoys the way languages flow in Istanbul’s spice market (‘turkish arabic english russian’), and wonders:

i was gifted two languages
whattabout me kids?
they say growing up bilingual is good for your brain

When one of his daughters asks if he reads Turkish books, he feels ‘her monolingual pain’. Later in the poem he buys seven books to take home. The poem ends:

ill read these books in turkish
my daughters will see me
___thumbing the dictionary

That’s the skeleton of the narrative, but it leaves out the ‘psychic luna park of associations’. Page 79 is almost entirely taken up with a digression. A story from possibly ten years earlier, before the children were born, it pretty much stands by itself as a narrative poem:

Here’s the text, including a couple of scene-setting lines from the previous page, and omitting the last three line of the page, which move back into the poem’s present:

in 2016 I had a little desk here
in an artisans building on the third floor
next door a fitter and turner
trembling walls 
he brings me tea
you wanna come to friday prayers? 
looking at my world map on the wall he says 
turkeys in the centre of the world bro 
right in the centre not like austria thats off-centre
australia!
even worse wheres that? in the ass-end! 
one day we left work at the same time 
walked side by side
he had just bought a pair of timberland boots 
and was feeling pumped 
his last pair lasted seven years
and were easily worth the two weeks wages 
do you make money writing? 
not really
why do you write? 
its a habit
do you write in turkish? 
mostly english
do people read books in austria? 
not much
in turkey no one reads
they like pornos you should write pornos then youll make money 
you have a point...

Every time I read it I smile.

I love this cameo appearance of an actual Turkish man in the middle of the poem’s ruminations about language. It’s a portrait created almost entirely out of speech, either direct or reported. For him, being bilingual isn’t a big deal – he speaks English with a North American accent (‘bro’, ‘wanna’), and his world view is cheerfully and unapologetically Turkey-centric. Islamic observance is integrated into daily life, and is a way of checking out a foreigner.

It’s a good example of the way Başkan’s lines flow. You may have to think for a brief moment at the tenth line – ‘australia’ – to check who’s speaking. But that pause for thought creates a natural break in the rhythm before the fitter and turner’s response, and you can feel the poet’s pleasure in recording that response.

I am grateful to the Giramondo Publishing Company for my copy of Two Hundred Million Musketeers. The publicity material accompanying it included an author’s note, in which Başkan says he returned to writing when his first child was learning to talk: ‘Mumbo jumbo and jibber jabber filled our home.’ The poetry in this book brings the exuberance of jibber jabber to the preoccupations of an adult life, from the difficulty of ordering takeaway coffee from people who can’t pronounce your name to the many crises of late capitalism. I’m so glad the judges of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards prompted me to take it from the shelf.

I am a man of settler heritage living on Gadigal Wangal country, where the days are suddenly warmer and magpies seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Omar Musa’s Fierceland and the Book Club

Posted on 12 Oct 2026 | 9 comments

Omar Musa, Fierceland (Penguin 2025)

Before the meeting: This is a fabulously ambitious novel.

Two children in a village in Sabah in northern Borneo are taken into the forest by their father on an excursion that turns out to be the beginning of his ruthless acquisition of ever-increasing areas of jungle to turn them into ecologically disastrous palm oil plantations. While there, the children witness brutally murderous treatment of an Indigenous man whom they have come to love. The rest of their lives is dominated by that experience, and by their troubled relationship with a father who represents the worst of rapacious, extractive capitalism.

Omar Musa is a brilliant spoken-word performer (see the YouTube below where he is accompanied on cello by his wife, Muriel Roberts Musa). The novel, his second, is not confined to a naturalistic mode of storytelling. In its opening pages the forest speaks, and the language cries out to be read aloud, even chanted. Here’s a taste:

mud-gravy & gizzard stones, steeple my long luminous bones & carnal green – the unseen seen – green is God naming itself, green is the sprawl, rot & fern-tickle of time – my steaming velvet a sprung floor for trickster tango – orang, hutan, orangutan, mousedeer, leopard, vampire ghost – black loam & clay blue-grey, sequinned by skulls, I wear my sapblooded heart on sleeve

The forest has further chapters, but as the palm-oil plantations spread, it has less to say and becomes less exuberant, until its final utterance is just a few plaintive words.

The main story unfolds in alternate chapters focusing on the two children, Rozana (known as Roz) and Harun – first in 1998 when they witness the terrible violence, then over the decades as they live with the privilege that comes from their father’s enormous wealth. They are sent to separate boarding schools in Sydney, where Roz, after a troubled adolescence, becomes an unsuccessful artist (and there is some finely honed satire of artists exploiting their diasporic status). Harun makes a mint from a virtual reality forest creation in Los Angeles. They return to their tiny village in 2018 when their father dies, and they inherit enormous wealth – unfairly distributed between them, but enormous all the same. They have both come to understand the devastation that their father has caused to the environment and Indigenous people, and the inheritance brings their ethical dilemma into focus.

The story is enriched by historical excursions – into 19th century Venetian glass-making, the beginnings of Malaysia’s palm-oil industry in a trade visit to Nigeria in the 1970s, tables as emblematic of colonisation. There are elements of what I’ll risk calling magical realism: mainly figures from Malaysian folklore like the vengeful female ghost, the pontianak. A character known affectionately as Crazy Auntie, a poet living in exile in Sydney, is the voice of reason – speaking against extractive capitalism. Roz’s redemption as an artist comes when she creates an installation based on Crazy Auntie’s poem, ‘The Song of the Wood’, translated into the more than 50 languages of Sabah: the book gives us 15 versions of the poem, printed in white on a mildly decorated black background. The English version ends:


Kill a language and a forest dies
Kill a forest and a language dies

Children of ash –

Be gentle with my heart.

While I was thinking about this book, I heard a radio program about some children of top Nazis (it’s at this link) who are facing the implications of their origins. And I thought of a close relative who is currently researching how our recent ancestors, sugar farmers in Queensland, benefited from the blackbirding of Pacific Islanders. Roz and Harun’s ethical quandary resonates.

I don’t think the book entirely succeeds. There are bits where you can feel things being hammered into shape. The conclusion (no spoilers) has a poetic logic but leaves too many questions unanswered. There’s a moment on page 132 when I nearly stopped reading. It’s in the chapter that tells the story of a glass bead, a murrina (but also a macguffin), from its creation in mid-nineteenth century Venice, through its passage from owner to owner until it ends up in the forest of Sabah. As a poetic history of colonisation, it’s laboured, but it works, until the moment early in the twentieth century when the Rajah of Pandasan, then owner of the bead, plays chess with a Polish visitor named Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. The Pole asks the Rajah what he will find if he keeps going upriver:

You get to the heart.
The Pole’s eyes light up. The heart? The heart of … darkness?
No, you fool, says the Rajah, laughing. The heart of spirit. The heart of light. Follow any River and you’ll get to a mountain peak. – no place on earth is more full of light.

Josef … Konrad, ‘The heart of … darkness?’ Get it?

Happily, this awkward knowingness is not at all typical, and I’m glad I decided to read on.

Page 79* gives you a better idea of the writing.

It’s 1978, 20 years before the inciting incident in the jungle of Borneo. Yusuf is the main characters’ father. Here he is a young man, a recently graduated engineer, in Nigeria with a group of Malaysians to explore ‘the age old cultivation’ of oil palms. At the start of the page, Yusuf is telling their genial Nigerian host, Ekben, that ‘he had grown to hate poverty with a passion that most people reserved for other human beings… He spoke unashamedly about his long-term plans. How he would have many sons and start an empire. He’d come to realise he was less an engineer and more a businessman, he said, although the engineering would come in handy.’

In this quiet moment where one young man proclaims his ambitions to another lies the seed of ecological and genocidal disaster. The novel doesn’t follow Yusuf’s career – in fact, the first full sentence on this page is the only account it gives of the career’s overarching shape.

He would go first into logging, where endless riches awaited, and then put to use the skills he had learned here.
—Working for the government? asked Ekpen.
Yusuf looked around.
—Working for myself, but with the government’s help. When I have a family, I’Il do anything to make their lives better than the one I had.
—Anything? asked Ekpen.
Yusuf paused for a moment, and in that moment, Ekpen cut in.
— I come from a wealthy family, so maybe I see these things a tad differently. But I can see that, in both of our countries, there are many opportunities now that didn’t exist before. It’s a new world.
— It takes a hard man to make his way in a hard land, replied Yusuf.
— Be careful, my friend, said Ekpen.

You get a taste here of the breadth and generosity of Musa’s imagination. However great the harm Yusuf is to do, there are real forces compelling him: the hatred of poverty, the harsh realities of his society, a fierce commitment to his family. As this is a flashback, the reader knows that Yusuf’s decision to go after those ‘endless riches’ will lead to the destruction of his family’s happiness and much more.

Yusuf strode into the market as if it was the one in Sandakan where he had once sold trinkets to make ends meet. He was looking for a gift for his new wife Jenab, a name he was still getting used to calling her, and another for his best friend Nurhanizah, who had just finished her studies and moved into a raucous sharehouse in Sydney.

This moment reminds us that Nurhanizah, ‘Crazy Auntie’, who is to become Yusuf’s main moral antagonist, and whom he will destroy, was once his best friend. She too is westernised, but the values that go with a ‘raucous sharehouse’ pit her against him. We’re also reminded that Yusuf’s loyal wife, Jenab, was once named Ruth. In the underlying schematic of the novel, it’s an outsider who is willing to support Yusuf’s rapacity.

The final paragraph on the page is an example of the kind of writing that makes the book live. Whatever Musa’s characters might be up to, his prose celebrates the vibrant reality of communal life, in Nigeria as well as in Malaysia.

The kaleidoscopic mayhem of the marketplace was a universe unto itself, a pinballing, jangling, chattering, humming orchestra of commerce and capital, voices rising in gossip and aggravation and trade, meat and fish lying on newspaper, some fresh, some flyblown, some smoking and drying in the sun, piles of chillies, okra, cassava, fufu wrapped in plastic, machines cleverly devised from spare parts into utensils for grinding and blending, the roar of these machines, and more upon more, the chatter of people hustling for every square inch, foot or naira in this city, wearing football jerseys and batik, the whole market like one giant textile woven from many different threads, creating a oneness that then frayed into disparate parts again.

This vision of the market celebrates organic, messy, apparently chaotic life that moves from oneness to disparate parts and then back. It’s like the jungle, in contrast to the regimented rows of the palm-oil plantations.

Incidentally, one of the small pleasures of the book is the use of non-English words without explanation. This page’s action is taking place in Benin City, Nigeria, so the two words that are new (to me) are Nigeria-specific: naira is not a measure of space as the context may suggest, but the Nigerian currency; and fufu is just what you’d expect from the context, a food – ‘a pounded meal found in West African cuisine’ according to Wikipedia. Elsewhere, the scattering of Malaysian and (I think) Arabic words contribute to the rich sense of place that is one of the beauties of the novel.

At the meeting: We started out the night with non-alcoholic prosecco, which meant that I could join in the toasting for a change. The excellent meal prepared mainly by the Mid-career Artist culminated in her signature pavlova. Then we discussed Douglas Stuart’s John of John, and finally turned our attention to Fierceland, which we had picked because it won the 2026 Miles Franklin Award.

It tended to divide us. One person didn’t read much of it and didn’t care to say why. Another felt an overwhelming sense of dread and stopped reading before the halfway point. Another said that too much of the book was taken up with ‘devices’: the history of the bead/murrina was just one of them. She didn’t much care for the chapters where the forest speaks.

One person gave an eloquent account of the book as a work of great ambition that fails to fulfil that ambition but is still an admirable and enjoyable work. I felt as if she was reading my mind. We could have done without the little chapter about tables and colonisation; the genre-busting inclusion of fifteen pages on which the same poem appeared in fifteen different languages is a darling that could have been murdered; and so on. But without them it would have been a less interesting book.

One person felt that a didactic element made some parts tedious. Others (including me) didn’t register it as didactic, though we did feel that we were learning things we thought we already knew, which must be one of the things that successful fiction does.

In these conversations we sometimes flick back and forth between the two books, but that didn’t happen this time. Maybe there’s the germ of an exam question there: ‘What don’t John of John and Fierceland have in common? Do not compare and contrast.’

The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Wangal and Gadigal land, which is where I wrote this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those Nations and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Douglas Stuart’s John of John and the Book Club

Posted on 11 Oct 2026 | Leave a comment

Douglas Stuart, John of John (Pan Macmillan 2026)

Before the meeting: I love this book.

It’s set on a remote Scottish island where Gaelic is still spoken in a fiercely pious religious community. Cal is a young, gay fine arts graduate who has come home from Edinburgh because, according to his father in one of their painful weekly phone calls, his grandmother is ill – the book’s opening sentence is, ‘Her feet were as purple as calf liver.’ The young man’s full name is Calum John, and on the genealogy-conscious island he is identifiable as John of John. John McLeod, his father, is a church elder and weaver – stern, ascetic, hardworking, painfully honest and a harsh parent. John’s wife, Cal’s mother, has long since left him and been ostracised by the religious community as a result. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that John, the father, has a long-term, secret, sexual relationship with another man, his neighbour Innes.

Chapters mostly alternate between Cal’s and John’s points of view. A rich portrait of the remote community emerges. A good part of this is in the language – not just the occasional Gaelic dialogue and the bilingual chapter numbering (a h-aon / one to fichead ‘s a sia / twenty-six), but in the English words that feel as if they belong in that place. On page 20 in chapter 2 for example, there are five words that were new to me:

  • croft (which I previously thought signified a small farm, but here refers to the house on the farm)
  • harling (here ‘painted an almost painful white’, this is roughcast – plaster mixed with small stones or shells, which I recognised in a scene in 35 Up one night this week)
  • rickle (a loose heap), skive (to pare or scrape, as in leather)
  • semmit (a vest or undershirt).

The meaning of all five is clear enough from context, but they enrich that context.

The plot revolves around the relationships of the three men and Ella, John’s mother-in-law who has been young Cal’s protector and a thorn in the side to John. Cal resumes the exhausting work of weaving at his father’s loom, and deals with unfinished business with other people of his generation, including a woman he was expected to marry and a man his own age who no longer wants to have sex with him. John must deal with Innes’s increasing impatience with their secrecy. More than once, John lashes out violently at Cal, and it’s a measure of the strength of the writing that we understand why Cal not only stays on the island but dutifully tells anyone he meets that the terrible bruising on his face was caused by a fall. It’s partly that Cal feels he has failed to make it on the mainland, but deeper than that is ancient family loyalty. Nobody believes him about the fall, but no one intervenes, and we understand that too.

A potential sexual triangle develops between Cal, John and Innes, which would make great comedy-of-manners if the stakes weren’t so high for all of them. For Cal, to be out as Gay would mean exile back to his mainland life. For the others it would mean the end of their lives as they know it, and for John especially it would mean facing his deep sense of shame. All the same, I must ask at the book group if other people laughed at the scene where Cal tries it on with Innes – I didn’t, but I cringed.

Page 79 is in Chapter a sia / six, one of the few that has a focus on someone other than John or Cal. This is Ella’s chapter. It gives her backstory – how as a young Glaswegian woman during the Second World War she had enjoyed the high life and resisted the attention of a taciturn man from the islands – Old Calum as he came to be known – until she got pregnant by a serviceman and Calum asked her to marry him. In this chapter we meet Grace, Cal’s mother, for the first time, and see Ella’s behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings to make Cal’s time on the island tolerable.

But page 79 itself is taken up entirely with Ella’s visit to a derelict blackhouse. A blackhouse, according to my web research, is a type of house that used to be common in the Scottish highlands and islands, built of stone with a thatch roof (‘laid up of stone and sod’, as Stuart puts it). (Wikipedia has photos.)

The page doesn’t move the plot forward, but the elegiac tone that suffuses the book comes into focus here. The state of the blackhouse works as a metaphor: the old ways of the island are on the way out, partly because of the different morality of the younger generations (Cal isn’t the only one touched by 21st century sexual mores), and partly because the traditional work of small farms and hand weaving is coming to an end.

Ella parked the car and clambered up the overgrown path. It was a long, low building laid up of stone and sod, and if she would have seen it on the mainland, she would have sworn it was a cow shed. There was a knack to opening the door. It had warped in the frame and she had to lift it and force it with her shoulder, much like a bailiff might. She was getting too old to do it. That anyone should see a woman grunt like this would be the talk of the church.

There’s so much happening in that short paragraph. We’re reminded that things are different from ‘on the mainland’, and that moralistic surveillance is everywhere. The clambering, shouldering and grunting keep the narrative firmly in the physical reality.

The Morrison blackhouse had fallen into such disrepair that she felt as though she had let all of Calum’s ancestors down. Several windowpanes had smashed one winter and in the thaw all the textiles sprouted black with mould. With no fire in the grate, finches built their nests in the gable corners, mice tore at the mattress and shat in the drawers. Then a section of the roof blew away. There had been two separate rooms but the dividing wall had liquified to mush. Now there was a puddle in the middle of the dirt floor and the surface was skittering with midges.

This is still intensely physical, but there’s also a reminder of the importance of tradition in this place, even for an outsider like Ella – ‘she felt as though she had let all of Calum’s ancestors down’. In the first chapter, on the ferry to the island, a woman asks Cal, ‘And who do you belong to?’ and he replies, ‘I’m John of John of Iain of Iain the Breabadair.’ Even for Cal with his long, dyed-blonde hair and his arty ways, ancestry is important. Breabadair means ‘weaver’ – Cal’s family have been weaving for five generations.

She liked to come to the house now and again and look through all the things from her past. The items that were truly meaningful she had rescued long before, but the house still held some odd ends of furniture and little outdated things, all the trinkets that Grace had whined about not having enough space for, her dishes and towels that all seemed to have a pattern or a fleck of colour that Grace didn’t like.

This may be the first appearance of Cal’s mother, Grace. As you might expect, there are interesting revelations to come about why Ella is living with her hostile son-in-law rather than her daughter, and about why Grace left John all those years ago, leaving Cal with him. But here there are just hints of mother-daughter tensions, of Grace as someone who knows her own mind and, though Ella might call it whining, can hold out for what she wants.

At the meeting: We had a terrific discussion of this book. I asked if other people had laughed at the scene where Calum tries to seduce Innes.Nobody had. They agreed it was weird but, as one of the women said, men do weird things. Weird or absurd, believable or not, I think we all agreed that it was poignant, saw it as a measure of Cal’s desperation for closeness and perhaps for a sexualised version of fatherly affection.

But the conversation really kicked off when one person said she found the whole thing unbelievable. Why did Cal stay on the island where he wasn’t welcome, and life was full of drudgery and violence? Why did John’s wife not blab about his homosexuality when she left him all those years ago? Why didn’t she take her sone with her? Why did Innes keep hoping after all this time? How did John manage to have a long-term homosexual relationship while genuinely adhering to stern puritan religious beliefs, preaching and practice?

They were good questions, and the rest of us fumbled around for answers. The importance of attachment to the place was mooted. The way small, isolated communities command loyalty. Cal is young – in his early 20s – and, like a number of unnamed friends of one person, unable to take the initiatives necessary to improve his life.

We spent a lot of time trying to work out what happens at the end of the book. It’s hard to say much here without spoiling, but I think we ended up deciding that while John’s future course is clear, Cal’s is up in the air: he has a momentary fantasy of how it will go, but on closer reading it seems unlikely that that’s how things will come to pass. The very final moments are inconclusive, though when we focused on the word bellwether, at least aspects of it became clearer.

Someone had looked up Harris tweed, and informed us that it is hand woven cloth whose production on rugged Scottish islands is rigorously policed. This is the kind of cloth that Calum and his ancestors have been producing.

We discussed this book in tandem with Omar Musa’s Fierceland. We had a great conversation about each book, but there was no crossover at all.

The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Wangal and Gadigal land, which is where I wrote this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of those Nations and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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How to End a Story, report 5

Posted on 5 Oct 2026 | Leave a comment

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 624, 1997, to page 693, the beginning of 1998.

It’s less than a month since my previous post about Helen Garner’s diaries. But I’m getting close to the end. This morning I’ve read the first three pages of 1998, the year the diaries end. If I post today, my two final posts will cover roughly the same number of pages.

Most of this third volume has been taken up with the marital difficulties arising in part from Garner’s husband V’s demands on her while he writes a novel. She has been effectively exiled from their shared home most days so he can focus on the work. No matter that she has seen him walking up the street with another woman (‘X the painter’) a number of times. No matter that she has found herself pretty much unable to write. He remains impervious. When they moved back to Sydney he said he would rent a flat as a workplace, but he admits he lied, and he’s glad he lied, because, ‘Look at the result.’

The result is the manuscript of a novel that has been the subject of a bidding war in Europe. (And, as we know, the novel Eucalyptus was to be a critical success.) Garner is full of praise for the novel, to V and in her diaries. She spends four days checking the proofs with him and (a moment that thrills my proofreader heart) she picks up a spelling error and when he gleefully faxes the British publisher to point out the error she bets in her diary that he doesn’t mention that it was his wife who spotted it. The episode was made even more delightful to me by the knowledge that I would have missed the error completely.

The book is coming to an end, and so is the marriage, though until this morning’s pages, both Garner and V seem to think they can make it work. They have talked about her buying a separate flat for herself, but that seems unlikely to work when immediately after that conversation he scoots off to do ‘husbandly’ handyman favours for X the painter.

Just after my last post (at this link), V said he hated Helen writing about him in her diary. After much discussion she decides (on page 627), ‘From now on I determine not to write about V except in passing.’ She resists the ‘pressure cooking feeling’ that comes with this restraint for about three pages. But it adds wonderfully to the reading experience. What, one wonders, does the real-life V think about this book? For that matter, how does the real life X the painter feel about it – it wouldn’t be hard to discover her real identity.

This morning’s reading begins benignly enough with an encounter with Clive James in which he gives Garner a tango lesson. There’s the usual bit of mild unpleasantness when she tells V about it. He asks if anyone else was dancing, and when she says no he turns away ‘with that smile’.

Then, in the last two pages of today’s reading, everything explodes. For many pages now, Helen has been suspicious of V’s relationship with X the painter. He has consistently protested that he is not being unfaithful, while she insists that if that were so he wouldn’t be so secretive about it. At the lunch where Helen dances with Clive James, a woman takes her aside and hints broadly that there might be some substance to her suspicions. Helen leaves a ‘very short, last-ditch letter’ for V, who is out of town, saying she missed the trust between them and would like to be able to establish it again. The next day, as she passes through his work room on some errand, she sees a folded sheet of paper on his desk. Thinking it is his reply to her letter, she unfolds it.

A blow from a baseball bat.

It’s a love letter to X.

She stumbles into the kitchen and goes berserk. My last page this morning is taken up with the spectacle of berserk Helen wreaking havoc. Bearing in mind that V’s novel is the most important thing in his life, and that the two of them have recently spent four days immersed in proofreading it, the culmination of her rage is truly horrific:

I grab the proof copy of his fucking novel and fling it down on his desk … I rip the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof copy with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind. The nib gives way, bleeding ink, and twists into a little golden knot. I hurl it aside

She grabs a handful of his cigars and dump them in spilled beetroot soup in the kitchen sink, but before that:

I leave a note on a card: ‘Don’t you know that being lied to makes people crazy?’

I had to leave it there. I snuck a look at page 694 and see that at first he denies everything but by the end of the page he’s owning up.

Throughout most of this volume, Garner has described herself as unable to write anything apart from journalism. I can’t be the first to observe that during that whole time she was writing her diary, and I can’t be the first to observe that during what she saw as a fallow period she was in fact writing a masterpiece. An extremely uncomfortable read, sometimes vicious about other people, sometimes ruthlessly self-critical, occasionally blisteringly honest – as in her description of her berserk behaviour: one thing to have done it, but how extraordinary to make herself write in such specific detail what she did.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Pam Brown’s Guess the Experience

Posted on 2 Oct 2026 | Leave a comment

Pam Brown, Guess the Experience (Hunter Publishers 2025)

I’ve been ruminating on Guess the Experience for about a month now. More precisely, I’ve been trying to find words for what I enjoy about it – and I have enjoyed it a lot.

It’s not the kind of poetry you can memorise to recite at weddings, funerals, sleepless nights, break-ups, or fallings-in-love.*

It doesn’t have a compelling narrative or a straightforward argument.

Rather than try for generalities, I’ll stick to page 79**, and see what I come up with.

Page 79 is part of an eight-page poem, ‘pulp to reform’. An endnote informs/reminds us that Pulp was a British art-rock band. In 2022, commenting on a facebook headline, ‘Pulp to Reform’, Melbourne poet Michael Farrell said it sounded like the title of a Pam Brown poem. She rose to the challenge and wrote the poem. As far as I can tell, the poem doesn’t relate to the band at all (though I did go looking: ‘Common People‘ was their song).

The poem is made up of six sections ranging from 11 to 27 lines long. It’s not always clear how the sections relate to each other. In fact it came as a surprise to me on first reading when the last lines referred back to the opening. The first section begins:

this is
__my first interview
____since my death

And the poem ends: 

from this cardboard coffin
________some final words –

So the poem’s set-up is clear: the speaker is giving a posthumous interview. But it doesn’t deliver on that promise. The final section acknowledges as much, and also contains a description of the poetry. Here it is in full:

this interview
has digressed

i'm not sure
what you want
____to know

is it
about the poetry?

all
___accidental

from this cardboard coffin
________some final words –

Pretty much everything between the opening lines and ‘this interview / has digressed’ is digression. But if you want to know about the poetry, the speaker says, I can tell you it is ‘all accidental’. The speaker obviously isn’t Pam Brown herself – Pam Brown isn’t dead, for one thing. But ‘all / accidental’ isn’t a bad description of how this poetry feels. Having said that, there’s always a sense of discipline in the lines.

But I’ve got ahead of myself.

Page 79 is roughly the first half of the poem’s third section. In my reading the first section has set up the situation and given an elliptical account of the speaker’s death (‘I swallowed / a cotton bud’ – comedy rather than tragedy) – and of the kinds of health fads she had lived among. The second, she recalls working in the kitchen. Georges Perec is mentioned and apparently quoted – ‘question your teaspoons’. The reference was obscure to me, and in my usual lazy manner I was happy to accept it as adding flavour. But because I’m blogging about the poem I went hunting and found this wonderfully illuminating quote from Perec’s 1973 essay, ‘Approaches to What?’ (at this link):

It turns out the reference isn’t just adding flavour. The speaker has been noticing details in the kitchen sink (‘little transparent / purplish white globes’), Perec’s essay comes to mind and, crucially, Perec’s injunction, ‘Describe your street,’ prompts the transition to the next section, the one on page 79 (ignore the first two words): 


out in the street 
on the odd numbers side
________a house number 
________-_____is missing

heading
north to south 
_-__facing east

into sunrises 
pinkish or reddish 
on a good morning

this is 147
the hermit's at 149
__-__151 is missing
no house_ no number 
then
the rental terrace 153

On first reading I enjoyed this page for a completely idiosyncratic reason. My six-year-old grandson is currently fascinated by numbers, and his fascination is contagious. He loves it, for example, that we are in unit 43, across the landing is 41, the unit directly under us is 40. And now I love it too. These lines feed directly into that fascination. Having done my research and come to a reading that makes sense of what the lines are doing in the context of the poem as a whole, the initial pleasure stays in place, but feels less idiosyncratic: the poem is drawing attention to such trivial details as ways by which, as Georges Perec puts it, we try ‘to lay hold on our truth’.

This section of the poem continues – it takes up the ‘sunrises / pinkish or reddish’, with a description of an inner-city dawn. In the following sections, the speaker remembers, as it were, that she is speaking after having died, and recollects that when alive she was ‘always polite / & / friendly’, speaking a little Greek at the deli and regretting that she never took up an offer to go to Samos. It all feels arbitrary, until it reaches the final lines I quoted above, ending with an inclusive dash.

The word that comes to mind is immersion. The poem creates the illusion that you (that is, the reader) are privy to the poet’s mind – not to her finished, carefully utterances, but the turmoil of actual, distractible thinking in an actual inner-suburban place, ‘all / accidental’ but enjoyable as evidence that the human mind is, after all, the most complex entity in the known universe.

My copy of the book was a generous gift from the author.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post as the days are beginning to lengthen and get colder on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* I just remembered a funeral where Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman‘ was played as the mourning congregation watched a slideshow of the deceased’s life, so anything is possible.
**My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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