Steve Braunias reviews Wendyl Nissen's memoir of life with her unforgivable mother
Wendyl Nissen gave a kind of precis of a book she had yet to write when she was profiled last year by Judy Bailey in ReadingRoom. The interview turned to the subject of Wendyl's mother. She said, “We had a difficult relationship. Mum had a terrible childhood and carried a lot of that with her. It came out in her own parenting.” Her remarks anticipated her newly published and quite compelling family memoir My mother and other secrets. "Difficult", "terrible" – yes, very much so. The stories Nissen tells includes the time her mother said in front of other people at a dinner on a cruise ship, "Look at my daughter, the big slut."
The worst thing about it is that it wasn't the worst thing she ever said. That would probably be the time she came to Nissen's house after her third child died of cot death. She writes, "My mother sat in our lounge and demanded tea. I made it for her and then she said, 'This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.' She left, having not lifted a finger to do anything except drink her tea." This ranks right up there in the catalogue of exceptionally selfish, downright callous and totally unforgivable behaviour – but My mother and other secrets is not a book of grievance nor is it a misery memoir. It's a book of understanding. More so, it's a book propelled by the redeeming power of stories.
Nissen is a journalist. She worked for many years as an editor at women's magazines. Her book is at once a model of good reporting and full of gossip. The reporting and the gossip is about the lives of her parents, and their parents; both her mum and dad came from strange, sad, disturbing families. Among the most poignant moments of the book are taken from the 140 pages of medical records that Nissen digs up from Tokanui psychiatric hospital, where her father's father was taken to after he lost his mind. There are a clutch of heart-breaking letters sent to the hospital by his wife. "I am praying that my husband will some day be restored to health … My youngest boy especially is always wanting to know when his father is coming home." She means Cedric, Wendyl Nissen's Dad, then aged 11. His father never did come home. "According to his death certificate he died of pneumonia, toxaemia, bedsores and dementia paralytica."
And yet Cedric – the fatherless boy, who never visited him in Tokanui – turned out to be a top bloke and a loving, loyal, normal Dad. Nature, not nurture; sometimes the past is just the past, and you get on with it. Her mum, though, was kind of fated to turn out to be, at least sometimes, devastatingly, hurtfully, a total bitch. Nissen's story of her mother's early years is once again the product of good, solid journalism. A press clipping opens chapter three. It's taken from the classified pages of the Auckland Star on November 27, 1933. It reads: "FOR ADOPTION, Baby Girl, 4 months, for Adoption." Just like that – advertising a baby, next to the columns for Situations Vacant, and Lost and Found.
What happened next is quite a story. And you can join the dots (trauma, learned behaviours etc) to the treatment her mother handed out to Wendyl growing up in Birkenhead in the 1970s. It's a portrait of what used to be known, dismissively, as suburban neurosis. Her mother, she writes, "ebbed and flowed", wearing a new kaftan when guests came around and being a charming host, "and then didn’t get out of bed for two days." This isn’t the false condition of suburban neuroses. This, as Nissen writes, is "some sort of mental illness".
Every family has secrets, shames, skeletons. In short, every family has stories. Nissen tells her family's story with insight and good humour. It has a happy ending, of sorts. Dementia made her mother a nice person: "Finally I was getting the mother I had wanted all my life. Cheery, loving, sunshiny and pleasant to be with." Dementia doesn't always work out that way; it's a kind of Russian roulette, and a twirl of the demented barrel can bring forth a monster. Nissen writes, "There are many stories of perfectly lovely old people turning into horrible people ... One woman in particular haunts me to this day. She would sit in the day room [at her mother's rest home] with a large teddy bear and systematically beat it to death."
The beater of the bear was someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother. What was her story? How did things turn out for her, and her family? What unresolved angsts, what ancient resentments? In a book packed with stories and memories, one minor story lingers. It's from the author's childhood and it addresses the question that will forever be asked in every family household, sometimes as a challenge that cannot be adequately answered: "What's for dinner?"
Nissen writes, "Sometimes she would forget to take any meat out of the freezer before work so she would bash away at a slab of frozen mince in a pot on the stove until it succumbed and allowed itself to be cooked for a minute before a can of baked beans was added. Chilli con carne." God almighty. There's something universal about that desperate little meal. It evokes generations of mothers and parents, slaving at stoves, beating whatever's at hand into edible submission, doing their level best and not always getting it right. My mother and other secrets investigates the world we all live in – the domestic world – and brings back a wise, well-told, sympathetic, and highly readable report.
My mother and other secrets by Wendyl Nissen (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
