We resume our series on Charlotte Grimshaw's memoir. Today: ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias on navigating a friendship
The fact that I'm friends with Charlotte Grimshaw as well as her parents Karl and Kay Stead, who she lovingly, persistently and ferociously hauls over the coals in her new memoir The Mirror Book, means that any attempt to write about the book requires walking nimbly and fearfully over said hot coals. I don't want to get burnt. They have been wonderful and loyal friends over the years and I care for them very deeply. None of the various assorted claims and revelations in The Mirror Book changes that. This is a family war, made public, and while many or most readers will probably take the author's side – she's the one telling the story, brilliantly; The Mirror Book is a work of considerable artistry - I'll bags Switzerland.
In any case I've been here before, in 2018, when I draped myself in the Swiss flag to chair Charlotte and Karl at a session in the Going West literary festival. The shit went down that day and it was kind of like a preamble to The Mirror Book. Landfall had only recently published Charlotte's review of Catherine Chidgey's novel The Beat of the Pendulum. Many of the best reviews operate beyond the confines of a review that sticks to the subject of the book being reviewed; they take on aspects of memoir, or thoughts that come to mind, or whatever else engages the reviewer to the point where it's perfectly acceptable to step aside from the book being reviewed. Charlotte took this to an extreme when she stepped aside from Chidgey's novel and made a startling confession about her life as the daughter of the distinguished author CK Stead. (She misremembers it in The Mirror Book as a comment she made in the Sunday Star-Times). She wrote in Landfall, "I grew up in a family home so stressful that I emerged from it chaotic.” I read this out loud onstage in Titirangi. It was quite shocking. Someone dropped a pin; everyone heard it. A tense, reluctant conversation followed.
I asked Charlotte, “What’s all this about chaos?”
She said, "It's complicated."
I asked Karl, “What’s all this about chaos?”
He said, "She was the chaos."
Both answers, both versions, are expanded upon in The Mirror Book. The memoir brooks no simplicities; it's a document of complications and complexities. There have been two outstanding reviews, by Rachael King at the Academy of New Zealand Literature, and Kiran Dass in Metro (a third follows this week, by Philip Matthews at ReadingRoom). Kiran came up with one particular word to describe Charlotte's writing, and it's such a good and accurate insight: "prismatic". I'll also settle for Rachael's description: "The writing is astounding."
Much of the book is presented in the form of questions, endless, subtle questions, as Grimshaw analyses and quizzes her upbringing. It wasn't very PG. There was no parental lock. Karl and Kay, she writes, were little more than amused bystanders while she roamed hither and yon, a child downtown after dark, up to no good – yes, very chaotic.
But there was worse in broad daylight. Philip Matthews refers to it in his review later this week. It happened at a public swimming pool, presumably Parnell, where the family lived. She was 13 and met a pool attendant in his 40s. He took her to the First Aid room. This devastating sentence: "If I'd complained to the police he would have been charged with rape." It's written almost in passing and the narrative immediately returns to the subject of parental indifference but the incident is so shocking that you wonder if it wasn't a hell of a lot more damaging than anything else (father's moods, mother's silences) she examines with such forensic attention to detail in The Mirror Book.
As well as the Landfall review, her novel Mazarine was very obviously critical of her family, and so was that amazing short story "The Black Monk" which I published in ReadingRoom. In fact "The Black Monk" was a kind of sequel to Mazarine. She writes in her short story, "I’d used some autobiographical details in my previous book and this had caused disputes. It was a story about a secretly dysfunctional family, and a woman trying to understand her past. I’d written about the way a family can be a regime, its dynamics echoing those of a repressive state…I’d always been loyal to my father; now I was slipping into a late role as the family black sheep."
She also writes, with a yeah-right roll of her eyes, "The memories I had were false, he said." It's dismissed as gaslighting. Karl Stead put it another way, in Diana Wichtel's superb profile last year in ReadingRoom: "I think her memory of her childhood and my memory of her childhood are somewhat at odds.” He went on to say, "She’s revising her view of her childhood. Well, she just has to get on with that and when I’m dead write her version.”
He can't have known then that Charlotte was writing her memoir and that it would be published in 2021. All I knew was that she was writing something, and, after Mazarine and "The Black Monk", imagined it might be another work of fiction that parted the curtains of real life and took from her family circumstances. I also assumed that whatever she was writing would be hurtful to her parents. I met her and her husband Paul for a drink. I asked her why write this now, when they were still alive, and (I remember using these words – sorry Karl and Kay!) "on their last legs"? Why not wait till they were dust? She writes in The Mirror Book about reading Karl's comment ("when I'm dead write her version") in that ReadingRoom interview: "There's no prospect of reconciliation, no dream of a happy ending with the dead." She meant it had to be written now. She said much the same when we spoke and she said it from the heart. She really loved both of them with a force that shook her to the core.
It was around about then that I chaired Karl at his book launch for the second volume of his autobiography. It was held last year at a church hall in Mt Eden. Paul and Charlotte sat in the front row. Karl had written about the death of his father and I asked him what he remembered of his Dad, what sort of guy he was, what he looked like; and something very strange happened. He went into – not quite a trance, but some sort of state, where he talked fluently and without pause, and almost without any awareness of where he was, like a man talking in his sleep; he spoke about his Dad in such a deep and moving way that it became clear that he was really talking about death, his Dad's and also his own; I was on the verge of tears the whole time and then I looked over at Charlotte, and she was in floods of tears, weeping openly, like a child at a parent's funeral.
The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. Tomorrow: Charlotte Grimshaw writes exclusively for ReadingRoom.
