Charlotte Grimshaw on the cost of writing her sensational memoir
Even after The Mirror Book had gone to print my father was demanding (by email as usual) that I cancel it and rewrite my family memoir in a ‘celebratory’ tone. In the end, though racked with guilt and worried about the exposure, I not only didn’t obey, I recalled and wrote about real events (ones that had happened outside the family) that were so traumatic I’d never described them to a single person in my life until, in middle age, I’d cracked and confided in a forensic clinical psychologist. This outwardly bland professional, to whom I gave the fictional name Dr. Marie Sanders (my family should blame meddlesome Sanders for everything; she was a very bad influence) eventually, after many sessions, began to bandy about the terms complex trauma and complex PTSD.
What struck me quite strongly was that after they’d read the book no one in my literary family (with the exception of my brother, with whom I had some wild, hectic and often very funny phone calls and who, while loyal to our parents, was remarkably generous about the book) made any reference to my experiences of trauma and violence. They were too busy deciding whether to sue.
My husband Paul was wonderfully positive. Every time I asked him if I should cancel the book he said, "No! Publish!" But my parents were disdainful and dismissive of my accounts; they regarded them as unworthy of discussion, and I had written them because of ‘fashion.’ Moreover, Kay pointed out to me and others (by email, comme d’habitude) Karl was about to publish his third autobiography, in which he drove a nail into the coffin of the arguments of X, and put readers straight on the issue of Y, and made sure the question of Z was put to rest, and now I’d got in the way of this with my appalling self-indulgence – and, she finished up scathingly, for what? Why?
"For myself," was the answer. Because Karl is justifiedly laden with honours, including the CBE and the ONZ, and he comes out all right in my book, and because your children’s lives matter too. I don’t think I could possibly damage his literary legacy. I don’t imagine his readers require him to have lived a bland, perfect, suburban life, the vicar of Tohunga Crescent. I would have thought readers admire the work: the novels and great poems, the intellectual heft, the sharpness and wit.
I love you, honour you and in this case defy you, was my answer. I’m finally making a real account of myself.
*
The book is about growing up in my literary family. I’d written it in a fever of lockdown-induced intensity, the silent, dreamy days, the empty streets, the melancholy sense that the pandemic might be the first chapter of the end of days. It was a great atmosphere for writing. We were all doomed, what did I have to lose?
I drew on old memories and roamed about in my youth, and it was a new and alien experience, trying accurately to recall the past, that ‘foreign country’, since what I usually did as a fiction writer was sit at my desk all day making stuff up. How much easier it is to rework observations and experiences, to alter the real to conform with a narrative plan; how much more random and formless is the shape of actual life, and what interpersonal explosions can erupt when you come out with a genuine memory: this is how it was, this is how I felt. The message I’d got as I immersed myself, or, my family would say barged through and poked around in the past was: "Stop this at once!" and "Stick to fiction please!"
Family is everything. Once I’d started writing my memoir it was hard to stop
In my short story collection Singularity, I’d written about getting lost in the bush aged seven, along with my 10-year-old brother and a five-year-old friend. This episode really happened and my story, "Pararaha" was a golden account of a lovely family where the children disappearing into a gorge in dense bush wasn’t much more than a funny little mishap, like the kiddies going missing for a few panicky minutes at the supermarket, or in the bushes behind the swings in the sunlit playground, the mum or dad rising from the park bench with a sudden prickle of unease…
My fictional account had been received in the family with approval and warmth, a big thumbs up. Nice story! Now, writing and remembering in my lockdown trance it occurred to me to wonder: the Pararaha Gorge? How the hell did that happen? This became the question, and it was a question about me. I wasn’t out to accuse anyone. In my view we’re all products of our circumstances and there’s very little room for free will. As I’ve said in the memoir, I adore my parents and would do anything for them. But I wanted to know about myself. Why my modus operandi? Why my strange ways? Why was I, for decades the dutiful daughter, always ready to mind the parental house and do the errands and deliver the loyal verdict on the family (Lovely childhood, a houseful of books) so obediently willing to write the version of events I knew was required? Who on earth was I? What was I like, and what were my memories, really?
*
In the middle of the level four lockdown my mother-in-law Audrey died, and my feelings about family intensified as the pandemic turned her death into a long and profoundly moving experience: first the tragedy for her children of the socially-distanced dying, then events that came to seem like a surreal and beautiful festival. On a blue blue day we drove across the water to west Auckland, no other cars on the motorway, only the hearse and its procession, the hard autumn sky, blinding clarity of light, utter silence. The whole world had stopped for Audrey.
On the way home the radio played "Run" by Snow Patrol and the lyrics, even if you cannot hear my voice, I’ll be right beside you dear, brought shattering tears.
The festival of Audrey: at her Anglican funeral in Auckland rain fell in sheets outside and her dog sat in the front pew wearing a black ribbon. Four vicars attended. Afterwards, one of them told me he no longer believed in a supernatural God.
"I never have, personally," I said. There was a heater turned up high behind me and I said, "I feel as if my trousers might catch fire."
"Perhaps we’ll both go up," he said.
When Audrey made it to her final resting place, the Takapu graveyard at Whatuwhiwhi in the Far North, her tangi was presided over by the most charismatic vicar I’d ever seen, a tall, beautiful Māori woman who wore high boots and sang and played on a green guitar.
Family is everything. Once I’d started writing my memoir it was hard to stop, and the interpersonal strife occurred because the story I was writing involved the family I’d grown up with, and in their minds it seemed, everything I produced, even if it focused on me, was really about them. There was an all-or-nothing, or black-and-white way of thinking in my literary family; either you praised them to the skies or you were guilty of a betrayal so dire it would be hard for the relationship to survive. I tried to argue for some shades of grey. Surely admitting a family could be a bit ‘chaotic’ sometimes, or the parents too distracted, or angry, or guilty of a few disreputable habits, didn’t amount to panning the parental oeuvre, burning down the parental home, blackening the parental name and killing the whole relationship? I didn’t think so. I was as devoted to my family as ever, but couldn’t there be room for my story too?
The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. On Monday, we published an extract; on Tuesday, a reflection by Steve Braunias; tomorrow is a review by Philip Matthews.
