tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/memoirs-85716/articlesMemoirs – The Conversation2023-07-11T09:26:48Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2094972023-07-11T09:26:48Z2023-07-11T09:26:48ZHachette has withdrawn a policeman’s memoir due to accuracy concerns. Should publishers do more fact checking?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536747/original/file-20230711-23-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=159%2C12%2C7971%2C5444&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Diego Fedele/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australian publisher Hachette has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/10/publisher-withdraws-former-police-officers-memoir-after-force-questions-port-arthur-massacre-claim">withdrawn from publication</a> the memoir of a retired police officer, after concerns were raised about its accuracy.
Christophe Glasl spent 16 years in Victoria Police before writing his tell-all memoir, Special Operations Group, named after the elite force he was a member of for four years. </p>
<p>In one chapter, Glasl writes of his involvement in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. But Victoria Police have said he was not involved in the response to Port Arthur – nor was he part of the Special Operations Group at the time. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536712/original/file-20230711-27-uy7rp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The original book cover.</span>
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<p>The case raises a number of questions: chiefly, what kind of fact-checking processes, if any, do publishers use when commissioning and editing non-fiction books, especially memoirs?</p>
<p>Victoria Police’s spokesperson <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/publisher-pulls-former-cop-s-memoir-after-police-raise-doubts-over-accuracy-20230710-p5dn4e.html">told The Age</a> the only contact it had with Hachette was in April, when they requested permission to use a photograph in the book. “The publisher did not request any fact-checking.”</p>
<p>Hachette said in a statement: “It has come to our attention that some of the content of this book is inaccurate. We have taken the decision to withdraw this book from sale immediately while we undertake further review.”</p>
<p>We don’t know at this stage what fact-checking was carried out by Hachette in relation to the Glasl book. But it appears it was read, contracted, edited and printed without key questions being asked about crucial claims made regarding his career.</p>
<p>Sadly, this case is not a one-off. In 2003 writer Norma Khouri published Forbidden Love, an account of “honour” killings in Jordan in the Middle East, explored through the murder of her best friend. Khouri was later <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/bestsellers-lies-exposed-20040724-gdjerm.html">exposed by journalist Malcom Knox</a> as a fraud: the book was an invention.</p>
<p>More recently, Belle Gibson’s The Whole Pantry, supposedly containing recipes that had cured Gibson of brain cancer, was pulped after an in-house publicity pre-interview (now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2016/sep/14/belle-gibson-quizzed-by-publisher-on-cancer-treatment-claims-video">available online</a>) revealed gaps in the author’s story, including that she didn’t have cancer. The resulting investigation revealed a bunch of lies. The publisher, Penguin Random House, was <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/penguin-published-belle-gibsons-lies-despite-gaps-in-her-story-20160920-grkdj5.html">ordered to pay a fine</a> of $30,000 by Consumer Affairs Victoria.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-hole-in-the-pantry-story-should-penguin-have-validated-belle-gibsons-cancer-claims-38843">The 'hole' in the pantry story: should Penguin have validated Belle Gibson’s cancer claims?</a>
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<h2>How do book publishers check facts?</h2>
<p>Book publishing doesn’t have the same intensive fact-checking culture as journalism – partly due to the resources it would involve. But it has its own measures.</p>
<p>The first element is trust, Andrew Wilkins, who has been a book publisher for over 25 years and was editor of industry publication <a href="https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/">Books & Publishing</a>, told The Conversation. He looks for authors with “credentials” – for example, he highly values journalists who’ve worked with a reputable publication, like a state or national newspaper.</p>
<p>If no one in the publishing house has expertise in the subject matter, he’d get a knowledgable reader to assess for red flags. And he might get the manuscript legalled, if there were legal or security concerns – though this is an expensive process and is not typical. “A good lawyer would flag some of the risks and key issues that need checking.”</p>
<p>Copy editing, or checking the work on a sentence level, is another layer of fact-checking, which involves “looking for inconsistencies”: including dates that don’t match, timelines, and that the places mentioned in the book exist. “But if it’s a personal recollection of what happened, without an obvious way of checking with a secondary source, you can’t verify everything,” Wilkins says.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536753/original/file-20230711-17-3zjxag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Copy editing is another layer of fact checking.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>And the final step is that a <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003336570/publishing-contracts-post-negotiation-space-katherine-day">standard publishing contract</a> requires the author to confirm they’ve verified the facts within it to the best of their ability, making them responsible for doing so. Even post-contract, publishers can insist on the work being assessed by a legal professional if contentious.</p>
<p>If the author refuses to make the prescribed changes, the publisher can always rely on the “<a href="https://sladen.com.au/news/2022/6/27/an-authors-publishing-contract-checklist">warrants and indemnities</a>” clause that exists in most contracts. These clauses ask the author to confirm the work is true (if it is a memoir, for example) and that it is the author’s own work. It also typically indemnifies the publisher against all losses, damages, interest and costs (including reasonable legal fees). Ownership and responsibility, therefore, lies with the author. </p>
<p>Journalists, by contrast, are required under the media code of ethics to source their allegations and confirm the integrity of their sources. They must make a reasonable attempt to seek a response from the person being reported on and verify the facts in their reports.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536751/original/file-20230711-25-ln4ks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A memorial at the Port Arthur Historic Site to the victims of the massacre.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luke Bowden/AAP</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-can-publishers-support-the-authors-of-trauma-memoirs-as-they-unpack-their-pain-for-the-public-new-research-investigates-189251">How can publishers support the authors of trauma memoirs, as they unpack their pain for the public? New research investigates</a>
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<p>Could an industry body look into guidelines for how publishers can better fact-check personal nonfiction stories – in a market that is hungry for them?</p>
<p>“It’s interesting to consider a centralised fact-checking service in partnership with a university, such as the <a href="https://www.rmit.edu.au/about/schools-colleges/media-and-communication/research/public-communication-research-and-advisory-services/projects/fact-check">RMIT/ABC Fact Check project</a>,” Tim Coronel, general manager of the <a href="https://smallpressnetwork.com.au/">Small Press Network</a> and a publishing academic at the University of Melbourne, told The Conversation. “But in practical terms that would be very difficult to do, with so many different publishers involved and the sheer length of a book manuscript compared to a news story.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209497/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Katherine Day does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Christopher Glasl’s withdrawn memoir of his time in Special Operations Group raises questions about publisher fact checking. How do they do it? And can it be improved?Katherine Day, Lecturer, Publishing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1985562023-01-26T13:33:08Z2023-01-26T13:33:08ZPrince Harry: early leaks came from a Spanish translation, causing confusion about what was really said<p>Eight days before Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hit shelves elsewhere, copies <a href="https://inews.co.uk/news/prince-harry-book-spare-on-sale-early-spain-five-days-ahead-official-release-date-2066225">went on sale</a> prematurely in Spain.</p>
<p>Over the next few days the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-64183891/page/4">UK media</a>, scrambled to <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/20945214/prince-harry-book-spare-released-early-spain/">acquire Spanish copies of the book</a>, having been unable to get English versions for themselves. Their reporting on the story was initially based on these <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11604447/Oh-Spare-Prince-Harrys-new-memoir-unleashes-jaw-dropping-attacks-Royal-Family.html">Spanish versions</a>. </p>
<p>The fact that many of the quotes had been translated from English to Spanish and then back into English was barely acknowledged. Sometimes, this results in change, or different versions, as we see below. The book’s <a href="https://princeharrymemoir.com/">tagline</a> is “His Words. His Story.” and part of the coverage centred around why it was important that these were Prince Harry’s own words. Yet what those words actually were, depended on where you read them. </p>
<h2>His words?</h2>
<p>One much quoted extract from Spare is Prince Harry’s account of how many members of the Taliban he had killed. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, my number: twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.</p>
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<p>This was a focal point for early spoilers on the book and was quoted differently in different publications.</p>
<p>On <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/prince-harry-asked-his-father-not-to-marry-camilla-as-moment-he-was-told-about-his-mothers-car-accident-revealed-in-book-12780602">Sky</a>: “So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either.”</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-harry-taliban-spare-book-memoir-zd883fnhc">The Times</a>: “So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.”</p>
<p>Neither of these translations is wrong. They show different ways of rendering the same idea – but the cumulative effect is important. </p>
<p>It was unclear whether early criticisms were responding to the published version or alternative translations. Those attacking the author for his stance may not in fact have been responding to “his words” at all.</p>
<p>A more detailed example comes in Prince Harry’s account – here taken from the book in English – of losing his virginity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Inglorious episode, with an older woman. She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze. Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.</p>
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<p>Unsurprisingly, this was another of the most frequently quoted leaks. But again, the wording is not consistent. The <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11602849/Prince-Harry-recounts-losing-virginity-older-woman-FIELD-biography-leaked.html">Daily Mail</a> quoted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“… a humiliating episode with an older woman who liked macho horses and who treated me like a young stallion. I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away. One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a very busy pub.”</p>
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<p>There are some significant differences. Firstly, a shift in agency and responsibility: a “quick ride” is recast to position Harry as dominant (“I mounted her”), while “things that were wrong” become “my many mistakes”, suggesting self-accusation.</p>
<p>There is also awkwardness, in the term “macho horse” and in the reference to ass spanking: would the author who talks elsewhere about his “todger” also say “ass”?</p>
<p>The different word choices may be partly about different translators working on the text that appeared in different places. A translator collaborates in rewriting the author’s text, brings out its interest and value, reads carefully for hidden layers of meaning and confronts difficulties and inconsistencies.</p>
<p>Languages don’t map directly onto one another and there is often more than one way to translate a given word or phrase. What’s notable here is that the invisibility of the English to Spanish to English translation process leaves readers not understanding why there are different versions. </p>
<h2>His story?</h2>
<p>Translation theorists have talked about translation as a kind of “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Translation-Rewriting-and-the-Manipulation-of-Literary-Fame/Lefevere/p/book/9781138208742">rewriting</a>”. Recognising the translator as an active writing agent is key to exploring the <a href="https://www.ed.ac.uk/literatures-languages-cultures/translation-studies/events/whose-voice-is-it-anyway#:%7E:text=Whose%20Voice%20is%20it%20Anyway%3F%20is%20a%20series%20of%20annual,collaboration%20with%20the%20European%20Commission.">ethical question</a> of whose voice is heard in translated texts.</p>
<p>However, the participation of others in the telling doesn’t necessarily mean Spare is no longer Prince Harry’s story.</p>
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<img alt="Spare's cover showing Prince Harry's face." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506464/original/file-20230125-24-iajob2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Spare on sale at the Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/book-by-prince-harry-duke-sussex-2247875479">lev radin / Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Storytelling is central to how we establish our identity, and it is social. We rely on communities to retell our stories and so, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains: “We are never more (and sometimes less) than <a href="https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268035044/after-virtue/">co-authors of our own narrative</a>.”</p>
<p>But how far can the ownership of Prince Harry’s narrative stretch when the words are no longer “his”? As we have seen, when fragments and differently translated snippets are all presented as “the text”, the resulting inconsistency undermines the authenticity of the story, and with it the agenda of the book.</p>
<p>The marketing for Spare and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6l0ObY2XVM">media appearances</a> surrounding its publication have leaned heavily on a bid to “tell my own story” and <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2023/01/prince-harry-frozen-penis.html">resist</a> “words being taken out of context”. The realities of translation show how difficult this is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198556/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caroline Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When the global press first reported on Prince Harry’s Spare, they were doing so from the Spanish translation – an expert explains the surprisingly significant impact this had on its interpretation.Caroline Summers, Assistant Professor of Translation & Transcultural Studies, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1943442022-12-05T01:29:58Z2022-12-05T01:29:58ZKim Mahood’s Wandering with Intent redefines the Australian frontier<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498630/original/file-20221202-26-grl0qz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C15%2C5145%2C3375&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kiwirrkurra Community, Gibson Desert, North Australia.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Kim Mahood came to prominence with the publication of her first book, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/craft-for-a-dry-lake-9781863591393">Craft for a Dry Lake</a> (2001), which detailed her efforts to reconnect with the land of her upbringing, a cattle station in the Tanami Desert.</p>
<p>Her journey was triggered by the death of her father, who was killed in a helicopter accident while out mustering in 1990. Craft for a Dry Lake is a mesmerising and prismatic account of a journey that folds together the author’s memories and her father’s letters and records. It is one of the defining works of memoir in Australian letters.</p>
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<p><em>Review: Wandering with Intent: Essays - Kim Mahood (Scribe).</em></p>
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<p>Craft for a Dry Lake bears certain resemblances to Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/wolf-willow-9780718197476">Wolf Willow</a> (1955), which also traces a pilgrimage made in mid-life to a childhood home on a remote rural frontier. In Australia, it might also be compared to Dorothy Hewett’s <a href="https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/wild-card-an-autobiography-1923-1958">Wild Card</a> (1990). When they return to their childhood homes, Mahood, Stegner and Hewett come up against the realisation that their home is no longer there. Of course, the place is still there, but the quasi-mythical quality of their origins is not answered by even the faintest sign that this place remembers them.</p>
<p>Had Mahood’s career ended with Craft for a Dry Lake, we would have been left with a poignant account of a childhood, flecked with wisdom and insight about the particular conditions that make life in Australia’s arid interior so distinctive. </p>
<p>But what distinguishes Mahood’s life and career since her first return to the Tanami in 1992 is that she has continued to go back. In time, she began to spend a good part of each year in the Indigenous communities that surround her family’s former cattle station. The other half of the year, she spends on the outskirts of Canberra, where she has developed associations with the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia. </p>
<p>Something of this dual life was visible in Mahood’s second book <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/position-doubtful-9781925321685">Position Doubtful</a> (2016). The book preserved some of the spare lyricism that had been the hallmark of Craft for a Dry Lake. But Position Doubtful also exhibited a much sharper sense of the contradictions of present day reality in the Indigenous desert communities. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495772/original/file-20221116-23-14wfmt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kim Mahood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scribe</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-kim-scotts-that-deadman-dance-22162">The case for Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance </a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Ground truthing’ and ‘deep mapping’</h2>
<p><a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/wandering-with-intent-9781925713251">Wandering with Intent</a> is Mahood’s third book – a collection of essays, some new, others originally published in Griffith Review, The Monthly, and Best Australian Essays. Where Position Doubtful was ostensibly a work of map-making, Wandering with Intent finds Mahood reflecting on the kinds of maps she finds herself trying to make. </p>
<p>They begin with Indigenous people, whose knowledge exercises a dimension of truth that will often elude the most accurate of maps. Like writer and academic <a href="https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/collections/paul-carter">Paul Carter</a>, Mahood settles on the concept of “ground truthing” to suggest that maps only gather their truth when they are forced to collide with the memories and understanding of people who live on the ground – that is to say, somewhere other than the Cartesian plane of the mind’s virtual map.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My version of ground truthing begins with the physical attributes of place, and moves onto what has happened there. It puts people into place, which brings into play science, stories, husbandry, history, metaphor, and myth. This form of mapping has been called various things — co-mapping, cross-cultural mapping, counter-mapping, radical cartography. The wordsmith in me likes the flamboyant suggestiveness of radical cartography, but my bullshit detector finds it pretentious. There’s nothing radical about what I do. The only surprising thing about it is that it hasn’t been done before. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In North America, the kind of cartography that Mahood is engaged in is sometimes called “deep mapping”, following the seminal work of historian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Least_Heat-Moon">William Least Heat-Moon</a>. The concept has been picked up more recently in Britain and <a href="https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/four-rivers-deep-maps">Australia</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498152/original/file-20221130-22-o53nm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>In Wandering with Intent, we see Mahood describe and reflect on some of the deep mapping projects she has been involved in. These have included working with the Martu people of the east Pilbara in their exhibition We Don’t Need a Map (2012) and the National Museum of Australia on their Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (2017) exhibition. That Indigenous art functions as a map is one of the intriguing lines of argument in this book.</p>
<p>In explaining the title of her previous book, Mahood notes that “position doubtful” is an epithet that often attaches to points on the sketchy maps of desert Australia. In doing so, she lays the emphasis on the epistemological uncertainty that marks the limits of a map’s purported knowledge.</p>
<p>In this latest collection, however, Mahood openly concedes that it is really her own position, and that of anyone who ventures to stand where she does – which is in doubt. She had always been aware that she walked, in her life and her writing, a particular edge.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But the edge I walked when writing about my interactions with the people and country that occupied such a significant place in my life was getting thinner and sharper. It had always been necessary to filter what I wrote through a lens of white readership for whom the remote Indigenous world represented everything from a utopian idyll to a wretched dystopia, but so far I’d managed to meet my own standards of truth-telling. This was becoming more and more difficult to do. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As this edge narrows and sharpens, it begins to resemble what it was once called, which is a frontier. The concept of the frontier is inherently imperial, insofar as it invokes the current extent of conquest. But frontiers have always been places of interchange, where overt power disparities often come disquietingly undone. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-literatures-legacies-of-cultural-appropriation-103672">Australian literature’s legacies of cultural appropriation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Politics and administration</h2>
<p>This is what Mahood’s writing is so good at showing. Among the essays included in Wandering with Intent are contemporary classics such as <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/blow-ins-on-the-cold-desert-wind/">Blow-ins on the Cold Desert Wind</a> (2007) and <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/kartiya-are-like-toyotas/">Kartiya are like Toyotas: White Workers on Australia’s Cultural Frontier</a> (2012), both originally published in Griffith Review. These essays depict the structural confusion that exists in remote communities in the Western Desert, where Indigenous people live in their evolving worlds next to the agencies of Australian government. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498153/original/file-20221130-18-uyc24q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What Mahood is able to depict, often with a brilliant comic eye, are the fundamental dilemmas that beset those who take on the jobs of administering “government services” in remote communities. She also dramatises the fundamental mismatch that often accompanies these daily encounters. It turns out that what local Indigenous people want is often rather different from the desires of Australian governance – even as the latter swing around with the winds of policy and the gusts of politics. </p>
<p>Compromises are reached, bargains are struck, deals broken, items lent and lost, compensations offered and on it goes. For Indigenous people, this is just the accepted texture of life, but for the interloping administrators – health workers, schoolteachers, police – this is often a source of profound disillusionment. They feel betrayed. But how is it that the coloniser has become the victim?</p>
<p>Mahood should be commended for openly depicting these situations and her work is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how the Australian frontier is by no means a thing of the past. The more romantic moments of her early memoir writing have been gradually washed away by her willingness to take seriously the present moment – to live it, in short. </p>
<p>In someone with less practical wisdom, cynicism would have taken hold. Indeed, at times Mahood seems haunted by the ghost of Heriot, the disillusioned priest in the Kimberley mission of Randolph Stow’s <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/8266093">To the Islands</a> (1958). Both Mahood and Stow had left childhoods forged with the image of station life to board at Perth’s prestigious private schools in the postwar years. </p>
<p>Unlike Heriot, however, Mahood does not fall into metaphysical crisis. Nor does she abandon a sense of the depth of desert life and culture. She knows that her profundity is not the same as that of her Indigenous companions, yet intuiting that it is only in taking seriously both the practicalities and profundities of life that something meaningful might be forged. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I write about what happens at the point of intersection, where traditional culture is still strong, where whites are in the minority but occupy most of the official positions, and where the unfolding narrative is complicated, nuanced, and evolving […]</p>
<p>That I exercise cultural privilege when writing about the desert Aboriginal people is a given. The question is whether I exercise this privilege in a way that can be justified. I have been grappling with this conundrum since I began writing, and it never gets any easier.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194344/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Hughes-d'Aeth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Kim Mahood understands that frontiers have always been places of interchange, where overt power disparities often come disquietingly undone.Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1875082022-08-04T12:19:36Z2022-08-04T12:19:36ZHandwritten diaries may feel old fashioned, but they offer insights that digital diaries just can’t match<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477020/original/file-20220801-70473-agy1og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C23%2C7951%2C5273&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Handwritten diaries and digital diaries both help preserve experiences and memories, but in different ways.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/woman-writing-in-bed-royalty-free-image/1341823785">luza studios/E+ via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first time I taught a college course called “The London Diary” for young Americans studying abroad back in 2002, each student ended up with a tangible book of memories, a handwritten record of their semester in London. But when <a href="https://www.grinnell.edu/user/smithp">I</a> taught the course 15 years later, the first question my students asked was whether they could keep their journals online. The question brought home to me how the image of a diary has shifted from words scribbled in a blank book to images and digital text on a screen. </p>
<h2>Why not go digital?</h2>
<p>Even while journaling apps like <a href="https://penzu.com/">Penzu</a> and <a href="https://diaroapp.com/">Diaro</a> become more widely available, <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/430306/notebooks-notepads-manufacturers-sales-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/">estimates</a> and <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/484891/children-writing-diary-by-demographic-uk/">surveys</a> suggest that a <a href="https://notedinstyle.co.uk/blog/2019/06/why-are-paper-diaries-still-so-popular/">sizable number</a> of the world’s diary keepers still keep handwritten diaries.</p>
<p>Fans of digital diaries grant them an edge in convenience, portability, searchability and password protection. Jonathan, one of my 2018 students, described in an essay for class how digital diarists can upload entries to multiple platforms, keeping some portions offline or restricted to a select audience while other parts go completely public. It’s harder to control distribution, encrypt entries or build an index with a journal kept on paper.</p>
<p>I already expected my students to use electronic devices to read course materials, to communicate with me and with their families back home, to write essays for class, and to navigate London. Why not let them keep digital diaries, too?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man writing in journal" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477023/original/file-20220801-13716-26oi57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Handwritten journals offer clues into the author’s life that digital diaries may not.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/your-work-ethic-speaks-volumes-about-you-in-royalty-free-image/1278396474">ljubaphoto/E+ via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Diary as artifact</h2>
<p>Poet and literary scholar Anna Jackson was researching the private papers of novelist Katherine Mansfield for her book “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/diary-poetics-form-and-style-in-writers-diaries-1915-1962/oclc/636898151">Diary Poetics</a>” when she made an unexpected discovery. Jackson came across a “piece of the world” that was also an element of Mansfield’s journal – a kowhai flower between two pages in a notebook:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“After all this time, there it still was, still yellow, still between the same two pages Mansfield had placed it between all those years ago. A piece of the world she wrote about was right there as a piece of the world still, not a piece of writing.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jackson’s experience shows the power of holding in your hand the diary as a physical object. What scholars call the manuscript’s “materiality” links writer to reader in an unexpectedly intimate way.</p>
<p>For historians and diary scholars, manuscripts are artifacts. A book’s binding, paper quality and ink can signal an anonymous diarist’s socioeconomic status. Changes in penmanship may show how the writer felt – drowsy, extra careful or agitated – while writing certain passages.</p>
<p>Some clues, like the bit of evidence provided by inserting a memento, relay intentional messages. Others, like crossed-out words, may reveal information the writer did not plan to share.</p>
<p>Physical evidence can also hint at what happened after a text was written. Damaged or missing pages may indicate a strong reaction to the contents. A few years ago, conservators at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, discovered a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/18/secret-unearthed-sailor-17th-century-journal-edward-barlow-national-maritime-museum">concealed entry</a> in the diary of a 17th-century British sailor. In his diary, he originally confessed to committing a rape, but later wrote a different account of the event, pasting the new page so carefully over the original that it went unnoticed for more than 300 years.</p>
<h2>Digital yet material</h2>
<p>Every original mark in a diary reflects an impulse of the moment. As diary instructor Tristine Rainer says in “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-diary-how-to-use-a-journal-for-self-guidance-and-expanded-creativity/oclc/1036808266">The New Diary</a>,” “At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include. … It’s your book, yours alone.”</p>
<p>With so many convenient features, digital diaries remain a popular choice. This option, we might be surprised to learn, even has its own form of materiality. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/How-to-Read-a-Diary-Critical-Contexts-and-Interpretive-Strategies-for-21st-Century/Henderson/p/book/9780415789189">How to Read a Diary</a>,” literature scholar Desirée Henderson notes that digital diaries, too, are objects, shaped by tools the diarist selects – in this case, software and hardware – to create the diary. The writer’s design choices, such as site structure, networking parameters, embedding of graphics, image and audio files and hyperlinks, offer grist for interpretation not unlike reading the nonverbal signs of a traditional diary.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Young man writing in journal outdoors" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477026/original/file-20220801-38718-19pzpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Every diary can be read as an artifact layered with meaning.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/young-male-writing-notes-in-a-notebook-sitting-on-a-royalty-free-image/1340138630?adppopup=true">Cavan Images/Cavan via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Writing into the future</h2>
<p>As I thought about offering my students the online option, I began to imagine them many years from now, coming upon that London diary from their college days. I remembered my first group of students drawing sketches on their pages, attaching a Travelcard, café napkin, or theater ticket. I remembered Anna Jackson with the kowhai flower. I couldn’t shake my conviction that future diary readers will be less enthralled by a digital product – even enhanced with multimedia – than by the quirky, untidy books hand-lettered by their predecessors.</p>
<p>In the end, I assigned my students – at least those who were physically able – to create their London diaries by hand. They could still use their phones to capture images or take preliminary notes, but in the end they would produce a material keepsake. </p>
<p>Several students decided to write in their notebooks while also keeping a digital diary. The dual process felt natural to them. To his blog Jonathan posted, “Like many children of the 21st century, I love the idea of keeping everything journaled online. This way I can make notes on my phone as I walk, have them automatically update on my computer, where I can expand with more time. If I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I don’t need to wake up a roommate with a lamp. However, the course also requires an analog diary.”</p>
<p>Every diary, “analog” or digital, can be read as an artifact layered with meaning – one that conveys clues to its writer’s life and times in both nonverbal signals and words.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187508/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paula Vene Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As material objects, diaries give scholars an intimate look into their subjects’ lives, including handwriting and mementos. What if diaries in the future are nothing but insubstantial digital ghosts?Paula Vene Smith, Professor of English, Grinnell CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1790862022-05-16T02:35:40Z2022-05-16T02:35:40ZHow to write about broken trust in a memoir? Janine Mikosza’s Homesickness maps trauma in bold new ways<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461204/original/file-20220504-23-5ta2s1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C190%2C2048%2C1226&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Layered hand-drawn floor plans from The Sharehouse Project by Janine Mikosza and Stephanie Jones</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.janinemikosza.com/share-house-project">Janine Mikosza</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>[…] what would it mean if you moved from house to house regularly? What would that do to your idea of yourself? How does it construct or alter the space inside you, your internal floor plan?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I am accustomed to reading difficult things. I affectionately refer to my research as “morbid” and I have indeed read many heartbreaking, dark books. </p>
<p>Despite my familiarity with the subject matter of trauma memoirs, Janine Mikosza’s <a href="https://www.ultimopress.com.au/homesickness">Homesickness</a> caught me off guard. For want of a less romantic phrase, it swept me off my feet. Her approach to writing trauma while processing trauma is revolutionary.</p>
<p>By revisiting the many homes she lived in during childhood, Mikosza maps the floor-plan of trauma (literally and figuratively) and unearths myriad truths about home, identity and loss.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Homesickness – Janine Mikosza (Ultimo Press).</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In an opening passage of Homesickness, Mikosza writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m afraid of everything, she says […] Nah, that’s a lie, she goes on. I’ve never been scared of driving fast on a gravel road, riding a runaway horse, losing my sense of direction in an unfamiliar city, swimming in an ocean at king tide, helping someone out in a crisis. But the rest of my fear is as real as it was when I was eight years old.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460748/original/file-20220502-14592-hiveq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Mikosza moves through fear: afraid of everything, then not, then afraid once more. And all of it – though contradictory – is true. </p>
<p>This is the thread that runs through Mikosza’s account of displacement, childhood abuse, pain and healing. Trauma causes contradictions in memory and identity but, paradoxically, truth lies within those contradictions. </p>
<h2>Validating materials</h2>
<p>Homesickness is a kind of scrapbook or dossier, where Mikosza compiles materials of grief and trauma. As well as integrating the works of other writers, artists, and performers (a cacophony of creative voices is heard throughout), she inserts her own art and previous writing. </p>
<p>Theorist Kathleen L. Fowler <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00497870701593747?journalCode=gwst20">describes these kinds of materials as “validating”</a>. They lend a narrative credibility. Fowler’s examples are things like “interviews, court records, police records”. </p>
<p>Mikosza’s validating material is more haphazard. She includes drawings and fragments she has written on napkins, post-it notes and receipts. These flutter through her life, and the book. Rather than evidence of a legal kind, Mikosza’s material validates the creative self and its persistence through (and beyond) trauma. </p>
<p>Of the documents scattered throughout, I was most struck by the floor plans from childhood homes, which Mikosza has drawn from memory. “Reading” the floor plans reminded me of reading comics, looking beyond the lines and into the spaces, textures and pressures of the strokes. In doing so, I was compelled to map my own (also numerous) childhood homes from memory. </p>
<p>Mikosza and <a href="https://stephaniejones.com.au/about-2/">visual artist Stephanie Jones</a> prompted the general public to draw their own homes from memory in <a href="https://www.janinemikosza.com/the-share-house-project">The Share House Project</a>.</p>
<p>The project encouraged people to map their memories in hallways, rooms and front verandahs. Mikosza develops this idea in Homesickness. Each chapter is assigned a room; each room contains not only writing but art, materials and intertextual references that convey a sense of trauma’s complex, non-linear pathways through spaces as well as bodies.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gMD7cAsH8qI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">THE SHARE HOUSE PROJECT – Memory Drawings.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Conversations with friends (and selves)</h2>
<p>The narration in Homesickness is unlike any memoir I have read. From the first sentence, Mikosza presents her memories as a dialogue between two people: an interviewer and a memoirist. Both are Mikosza.</p>
<p>Framing her memoir as a conversation between two people, who are two aspects of the same self, places Mikosza’s readers at arm’s length. The precise nature of the trauma she suffered is also left deliberately vague. Only late in the book does she hint at the identity of perpetrator and extent of the abuse. At times, Mikosza suggests this approach stems from coping strategies formed in childhood. The distancing technique acts as a form of protection.</p>
<p>Mikosza does not owe a direct confession to any audience, and self-protection when writing such a work is paramount. As she states near the beginning of the book, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>if whatever I end up writing is labelled a memoir, there’ll always be someone […] extracting, wanting more, more, more terrible details. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She goes on to reflect, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I guess it’s hard to find a form that captures the sense of what it’s like?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the memoir unfurls, inch by inch, we are privy to the construction of the story as it occurs; the “realness” of the story is built within the “unrealness” of the perspective. Mikosza trusts her readers by presenting them with this perspective, and readers who trust her are rewarded with a layered, interrogative and exploratory experience.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-complex-ptsd-and-how-does-it-relate-to-past-abuse-and-trauma-172497">What is complex PTSD and how does it relate to past abuse and trauma?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The tangle of trauma, trust and truth</h2>
<p>All memoir is about trust in one form or another, but trauma memoir even more so. These memoirs are often about <em>broken</em> trust – trust which has been abused or misappropriated. </p>
<p>The very notion of trust in a story of trauma is, therefore, fraught even before an audience for the work exists. Yet memoirists strive for trust and truth; readers not only expect but require these things. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Lejeune">Phillipe Lejeune has called this the “autobiographical pact”</a>. </p>
<p>In her book, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374528584/thesituationandthestory">The Situation and the Story</a>, Vivian Gornick suggests that truth can be “achieved” when readers see writers “working hard to engage with the experience at hand”. </p>
<p>However, <a href="https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/brain_development.pdf">trauma in childhood can change how memories are formed and retained</a> and grief can <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-brain-responds-to-grief-can-change-who-we-are">alter our sense of time and identity</a>. Additionally, <a href="https://www.onlinemswprograms.com/resources/how-to-be-mindful-re-traumatization/">retelling these events can be re-traumatising</a>. Trauma memoirists often have to work <em>within</em> the scattering nature of trauma in order to construct their own versions of truth.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461465/original/file-20220505-14-9akhze.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Janine Mikosza.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ultimo Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mikosza guides us through “her” truth, which is not necessarily an easy task. She battles with herself over what she can say, what she really remembers, and what the construction of memory might look like on paper, as opposed to in her mind. </p>
<p>At times, she acknowledges the gaps in her memory and intentionally obscures information. For example, there are rooms in the floor plans without labels, clearly belonging to a person or people whose existence is being avoided. </p>
<p>Mikosza changes names and places, drawing attention to the way these acts of concealment are about protecting herself and others. When she mentions a photograph she doesn’t want to include, she states: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some things can remain your own and don’t have to be shared. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In crafting her own version of truth, Mikosza both subverts reader expectations and complies with them. She acknowledges that disclosure can (and must) be led by the individual when it comes to traumatic memory. As she writes near the beginning of Homesickness: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we are complex, irrational beings who remember and forget, are filled with contradictions, and get stuck in our own problems. But we also have an incredible ability to transform ourselves. To survive.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/more-than-half-of-australians-will-experience-trauma-most-before-they-turn-17-we-need-to-talk-about-it-159801">More than half of Australians will experience trauma, most before they turn 17. We need to talk about it</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Sharing the floor plan, mapping the way</h2>
<p>I often joke to my nearest and dearest that writing a book about my grief wasn’t therapy, but it sent me to therapy. Mikosza makes this distinction too: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Art is not therapy […] Storytelling’s different from telling your truth. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But she goes on to propose that “together they can transform into something else entirely”. </p>
<p>This transformative relationship between truth and storytelling shines through in Homesickness. Mikosza’s approach is not only brave; it is <em>giving</em>, and vitally important.</p>
<p>I have <a href="https://theconversation.com/brittany-higgins-memoir-will-join-a-powerful-australian-collection-reclaiming-womens-stories-of-trauma-here-are-four-158960">written previously</a> about how trauma memoirs written by Australian women are “a valuable (and intimate) contribution to the conversation about trauma and sexual abuse”. </p>
<p>Mikosza’s form-bending, exploratory memoir, epitomises this, and will undoubtedly map the way for other writers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179086/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marina Deller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In her account of displacement, childhood abuse, pain and healing, Janine Mikosza recreates from memory the spaces she has inhabited and, in doing so, reinvents the memoir form.Marina Deller, PhD Candidate, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1775382022-04-04T01:29:01Z2022-04-04T01:29:01ZAnger, grief and gradual insight in Sian Prior’s memoir Childless<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455201/original/file-20220330-4833-m2t1zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>There are six of us: high school and university friends I have stayed in close touch with over the years; we are all in our mid-40s now. We are nurses, social workers, educators, writers, massage therapists and political activists. We are past the ideal childbearing years. Three of us had children and the other three did not. </p>
<p>For one it was a choice; for the other two it was circumstance. One of those two who struggled with infertility decided it was meant to be, and she is glad now for the independence it has given her. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Childless, A Story of Freedom and Longing - Sian Prior (Text Publishing)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>But for the other it has been a source of lasting sorrow. She would have been the best mother of all of us, in the way the universe works; she is the best auntie and gift-giver, listener and game player. I thought of her often while reading Sian Prior’s new memoir, Childless. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447430/original/file-20220221-28-ei6fbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
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<p>Memoirs allow us to slip into someone else’s skin, to see the world through their eyes for a little while and expand our understanding. Prior uses short chapters which jump through narrative time to tell her story of being childless not by choice but by circumstance. </p>
<p>They are rich with evocative detail and cover a broad spectrum of subjects and spaces. They paint discrete scenes, which build up to a full picture of the grief of not having a child, the anger when Prior sees parents with children who are not cherishing them, the desire to have a child alongside concern about the environmental impact. </p>
<p>Prior does not hide her rage at those who have children whom she judges unworthy of them and at times it made me uncomfortable – I felt guilty. I thought of the times when I was a bad mother: I shouted at my children for not getting their shoes on quickly enough, I looked at my phone when I ought to have been looking at them. No parent is perfect. But I think she is honest, as well, to show us her rage: it’s not sensible, but it is real. And with acceptance of it comes gradual insight as well. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Through all these years I spent trying to have a child, I thought giving birth would stop me feeling like a failure. Probably it would have just been the beginning of a different way of failing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is Prior’s second memoir; her first, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22040760-shy">Shy</a> (2014), examined her own social anxieties and the causes and symptoms of shyness, and the way it had influenced her life. In Childless, she turns the lens on herself again, although there is less external research and more focus on her own experience. </p>
<p>At times, the observations she makes are not backed up by references. “Here in Australia, real children are increasingly depressed, neglected, abused, violent and suicidal,” Prior writes at one point. I believe children are facing greater challenges than they once were, but I’d still like to know the source of such a sweeping statement. And I wonder if abuse, depression and anxiety are also reported more frequently now than at any point in our history. </p>
<p>I thought here of author Mary Karr’s advice to memoir writers from her book <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-art-of-memoir-mary-karr">The Art of Memoir</a>: “The goal of a voice is not to speak with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.” That subjective curiosity was sometimes missing in Childless. </p>
<p>In another memoir of childlessness and unsuccessful attempts at IVF, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/avalanche-9781926428758">Avalanche</a> (2016), Julia Leigh writes about her own experience with infertility but also about the ethics of the IVF clinics that promise something to desperate couples, fudging figures and making a great deal of money out of the desire for a child.</p>
<p>At one point in Avalanche, Leigh asks her doctor how many women her age bring home a baby after fertility treatment and his answer is shocking: 2%. It is a moment that stayed with me, a deeper reflection on the culture we live in, the desperation this industry is tapping into, and the greed of the clinics. Leigh’s curiosity gives us this moment, her desire to dig deeper into why she was unable to have a child.</p>
<p>This is not Prior’s focus, but at the end of Childless I could not say exactly what her focus was. There is some grace found, some acceptance, but there is also blame and many missed opportunities to be involved in other children’s lives. Perhaps it is the messiness of it all that Prior is embracing. There is no neat narrative arc here, this is life and things don’t work that way. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shyness-isnt-nice-but-shyness-shouldnt-stop-you-28010">Shyness isn't nice, but shyness shouldn't stop you </a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Beyond binaries</h2>
<p>“The problem with true stories is that there are too many different truths,” Prior writes at one point. And the problem with Google is that when she mentions a famous musician/songwriter ex-partner by a pseudonym you find him in seconds. There is a lot of focus on this relationship, as there was in Shy.</p>
<p>One of the complicating factors is that he has children from previous marriages and a vasectomy, so decides not to participate in IVF with her. The memoir opens with one of these scenes: they are together, in a hotel room on his tour, and she is injecting herself with IVF hormones but doing it alone. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455202/original/file-20220330-23-1nn343s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In vitro fertilisation of a human female cell. Microscopic view, 3D rendering.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She watches him not watching her, “because this has nothing to do with him”. He does not offer to drive her to medical appointments; he is present but absent. It is complex and fraught. Of course it has something to do with him, in the end, and Prior seems to circle and circle these scenes, seeking out answers. </p>
<p>At one point, she asks, “What choices do I have because I’m not getting what I most wanted.” </p>
<p>I think of my dear childless friend here, who spends weeks every year with her nephews, who was able to help care for her father in his final months. Who will sit with a child and craft for hours. Sew costumes for Halloween. Who has always had the time to listen.</p>
<p>I think it is easy to get distracted now by binaries: the vaccinated and anti-vaxxers, the vegans and the paleos, the parents and the child-free. Memoirs like Prior’s remind us that human experience is far more complex, that there are so many gradations, so much light and shadow. </p>
<p>Our choices are one thing, but we are also made up of our disappointments. Of what we have lost and what we never had the chance to have.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177538/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eleanor Limprecht does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Rich with evocative detail, an author’s personal account of childlessness has no neat narrative arc, but is touched by grace and acceptance.Eleanor Limprecht, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1502792021-03-22T15:36:35Z2021-03-22T15:36:35ZFiction and memoirs were covering health way before the COVID-19 pandemic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387582/original/file-20210303-21-1vgtddf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C20%2C1876%2C1054&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dostoyevsky's story 'The Double' explores the uncanny theme of a replica of oneself, but today's literary foes are often amorphous ones like environmental degradation. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Beyond the viral contagion of COVID-19, the pandemic’s accompanying social and economic hardships <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-recovery/202012/covid-19-s-ripple-effect-mental-health-and-addiction">have challenged many people’s physical and mental wellness</a>. Over the past year of navigating living in a pandemic, it’s become clear that relationships matter to health: relationships between body and mind, between neighbours and between individuals and their societies. </p>
<p>Literature was dissecting these connections long before the outbreak. Recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/23/health-sickness-memoirs-feel-better-nick-duerden">memoirs, non-fiction</a>, fiction, poetry and graphic novels related to physical and mental health examine not just <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113758696">the fragility of individuals but how individuals relate to social and power structures</a> like capitalism, racism or colonialism. Writers have also explored how people’s social roles and identities shape their relationships to narrative itself. As American poet and memoirist Anne Boyer writes in <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/anne-boyer">her Pulitzer Prize-winning</a> <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374279349">memoir, <em>The Undying</em></a>, “I do not want to tell the story of cancer in the way that I have been taught to tell it.” </p>
<p>For several years, I have been researching, writing about and teaching literary texts related to maladies like depression, substance abuse and cancer. I’m interested in how narratives about health published today explore the interdependence of bodies and their environments in a way that may teach us important lessons during the pandemic, and beyond it.</p>
<h2>The ‘literature of madness’</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00489733">Since the 1960s, critiques of medical education</a>, medical <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/health-illness-and-disease/beyond-the-wounded-storyteller-rethinking-narrativity-illness-and-embodied-self-experience/E7AA99606B1799FD303C646B2B10F40B">ethics and the role of narrative in healing</a> have meant an emerging awareness of how the medical field can be allied with literature.</p>
<p>Some medical schools are <a href="https://www.mhe.cuimc.columbia.edu/our-divisions/division-narrative-medicine">requiring students to take literature courses to become more adept with reading patients’ stories</a>; some students take my contemporary literature course at University of Victoria to satisfy a medical school course requirement. The convergence of these two fields is helping to disrupt the canonical “literature of madness.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/386268/original/file-20210224-19-g8rsjm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, c. 1900.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Library of Congress/Wikimedia)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Starting in the 1970s, mental illness became a hot topic in literature departments. Books like <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=3600">Shoshana Felman’s <em>Writing and Madness</em></a> and <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691014012/madness-in-literature">Lillian Feder’s <em>Madness in Literature</em></a> marked the new interest. </p>
<p>In “Literature of Madness” courses at various universities, students studied <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/272/272284/notes-from-underground-and-the-double/9780140455120.html">Dostoyevsky’s <em>The Double</em></a>, Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/305985/the-yellow-wall-paper-and-selected-writings-by-charlotte-perkins-gilman/">The Yellow Wallpaper</a>,” Ken Kesey’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/537784/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest-by-ken-kesey/9780451163967"><em>One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest</em></a> and Sylvia Plath’s <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Bell_Jar.html?id=cZpR_0kN9gEC&redir_esc=y"><em>The Bell Jar</em></a>. </p>
<p>These health stories pit mentally ill characters against individual antagonists like husbands, mothers, doctors and nurses, or, fighting oneself as seen through the ancient <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43308211?seq=1">literary theme of the double or dopplegänger</a> (as in Dostoyevsky’s tale). Yet some critics have also explored how these narratives examine individuals battling formidable but intangible foes, and thus comment on social ills: For example, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/378115?seq=1">patriarchy in <em>The Bell Jar</em></a>
and “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/463709?seq=1">The Yellow Wallpaper</a>.”</p>
<h2>Social ills</h2>
<p>Many recent health narratives today are questioning how well-being <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/health-promotion/population-health/what-determines-health.html">is damaged by social determinants of health like income inequality and racism</a>. They are also examining how health relates to <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects">phenomena like capitalism and climate change, which are elusive but all-pervasive</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Cover of 'The Undying.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/387375/original/file-20210302-19-wbhnks.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The Undying’ by Anne Boyer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For instance, Boyer damns the American health-care system, with its outrageous costs and lack of guaranteed sick leave, but also capitalism as a whole. For her, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Illness_as_Metaphor_and_AIDS_and_Its_Met.html?id=ZZ806Vanu3IC&redir_esc=y">like Susan Sontag</a>, cancer infuses culture as much as human bodies, but economic pressures also cast a huge shadow. </p>
<p>Blending personal experience and big-picture analysis can be found in other recent health memoirs. In <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/leslie-jamison/the-recovering/9780316259583/"><em>The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath</em></a>, American writer Leslie Jamison discusses her own experiences of alcoholism as a white woman alongside the racism of the American criminal justice system. As she observes: “White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of colour get punished.” </p>
<p>The best-selling essay collection <em>A Mind Spread Out on the Ground</em>, by Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott, examines
how <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/a-mind-spread-out-on-the-ground-1.4930281">systematic oppression of Indigenous communities is linked to depression</a>.
Her settler therapist can’t understand why she’s depressed, and none of her self-help books actually help. </p>
<p>She writes of one, “There is nothing in the book about the importance of culture, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/588523/a-mind-spread-out-on-the-ground-by-alicia-elliott/9780385692380">nothing about intergenerational trauma, racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia</a>.”</p>
<p>This interest in the social determinants of health isn’t limited to non-fiction. <a href="https://drawnandquarterly.com/sabrina"><em>Sabrina</em></a> by <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n07/namara-smith/dots-and-dashes">American cartoonist Nick Drnaso</a> is a 2018 graphic novel that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/24/man-booker-prize-2018-longlist-nick-drnaso-sabrina-ondaatje-graphic-novel">was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize</a>. <em>Sabrina</em> takes stock of what appears to be PTSD and depression <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/21/the-bleak-brilliance-of-nick-drnasos-graphic-novels">in a political climate of misinformation and conspiracy theories</a>. </p>
<p>As one character fills out a daily wellness report, the reader may realize anyone would feel depression and anxiety in such a world.</p>
<h2>Health among the living</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, Fady Joudah, a Palestinian American poet and practising doctor, weighs economic inequity and a lack of sustainability in “<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/corona-radiata-new-poem/">Corona Radiata</a>,” a poem about COVID-19 published last March. “Corona Radiata” argues that we need to understand health as contingent on relationships between humans — and between humans and other living things. Joudah suggests that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Far and near the virus awakens</p>
<p>in us a responsibility</p>
<p>to others who will not die</p>
<p>our deaths, nor we theirs,</p>
<p>though we might …” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He’s right, if hopeful. Until the vaccine is widely distributed, public health will depend on our ability to understand ourselves as part of an inconceivably vast network. </p>
<p>American novelist <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers">Richard Powers’s</a> <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393356687"><em>The Overstory</em></a>, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019, also unites health with responsibility. In the novel, characters challenged by physical disabilities and strokes find ways to communicate with and through nature. A scientist almost dies by suicide early in the novel before recommitting herself to loving as well as studying the trees. Environmental activism gives them purpose, even if it doesn’t heal them.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1118203131689672705"}"></div></p>
<h2>Future health stories</h2>
<p>British writer Robert Macfarlane <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever">has proposed that the environmental crisis will continue to transform our literature and art</a>. Many recent works support his idea. In particular, the latest health literature fuses various genres, including memoir, biography, reportage, literary and cultural criticism, science writing and prose poetry. </p>
<p>The new health literature also reminds us that our health and the planet’s are inextricably linked. In the near future, this genre is likely to increasingly address the impact of climate change on our physical and mental well-being, such as <a href="https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327354">the rise in eco-anxiety</a>. I think we’ll see a blending of literature, medicine and environmental studies more and more often.</p>
<p>Some researchers <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.07.014">have noted a link between reading and longevity in individuals</a>. Reading health literature may spur us to support longevity for the Earth too.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150279/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cynthia Spada does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Beyond the ‘literature of madness,’ the narratives about mental and physical health published today explore the interdependence of bodies and their environments.Cynthia Spada, Sessional Lecturer in the Department of English, University of VictoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1448332020-08-25T15:02:35Z2020-08-25T15:02:35ZNora Waln: Quaker journalist whose memoir tried to understand the Nazis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354108/original/file-20200821-16-3kirlu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C17%2C3000%2C2339&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nora Waln lived in Germany through the rise of the Nazi Party, leaving shortly before Kristallnacht.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Collection (with Amazon image inset)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“I have striven to give a clear, true, and balanced picture”, wrote Nora Waln in the account of her years in the Third Reich. </p>
<p>An American journalist, she had moved there from China with her musician husband in 1934. They spent the next four years exploring Germany, Austria, and then Czechoslovakia, mixing with the “cultured classes”, and soaking up the music scene. </p>
<p>A few months before <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/kristallnacht"><em>Kristallnacht</em></a> – the Nazi-led night of anti-Jewish pogroms on November 9 1938, the Walns left Germany for England. There, the following year, Nora published her memoir of the period, <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/nora-waln/reaching-for-the-stars/">Reaching for the Stars</a> (reiussed in 1992 as <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-939149-81-0">The Approaching Storm: One Woman’s Story of Germany, 1934-1938</a>). Waln’s approach seems shocking today, as she insists on seeing both the good and bad in the people around her in these early years of the Nazi regime. She was determined not to write off a country she loved, but was deeply shaken by its political trajectory.</p>
<p>Her memoir presents a broad range of sources and people, and her voice is rarely critical. Some subtle critiques emerge in moments of contrast and irony, though. For example, a countryside Christmas scene in 1934 shows the early nature of Nazi antisemitism, as nonsensical as it was pernicious. She hears carollers singing “<em>Freu dich, o Israel</em>” (Rejoice, oh Israel), but also records that “at the entrance and exit of every village, and sometimes before houses, stood a sign against the Jews”.</p>
<p>She reports on the suffering of Jews made to lose their jobs and homes (though not yet deported), alongside stories of loved ones sent to concentration camps for opposing Nazi ideas. There are stories of denunciations by neighbours, tragic suicides and one account of a missing husband returned to his wife as ashes in a cigar box, “marked with a swastika, and the word "traitor” before her husband’s name".</p>
<h2>Common ground</h2>
<p>Waln’s account does not separate the sufferers of Nazi oppression into Jews and non-Jews (“a distinction in tragedy of which I did not see the point”). She also refuses to demonise the Germans that she meets – whether they supported the National Socialists or not. On the contrary, she travels widely in order to understand the Nazi phenomenon better: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It had become imperative that I know who were Nazi, and why […] I had to learn these things by actual acquaintance with National Socialists. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Waln forged a number of close friendships on her travels. One example is an aristocratic family of foresters on the Wiegersen estate in Lower Saxony, who shared her deep love for trees. Remembering how she was welcomed into the heart of the family, she reflects: “In such ways only will humanity get past the false barriers of nationalism which have so corrupted human society.”</p>
<p>Her commitment to finding common ground with everyone she met sprang from her Quaker faith, seeking to recognise that there is “<a href="https://www.quaker.org.uk/about-quakers/our-faith">that of God in everyone</a>”. But her memoir makes for uncomfortable reading at times, for example, when she remembers being pleased to hear that Hitler had liked her first book: “To write clearly is not easy. I am thrilled when I satisfy a reader.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Nazi German Soldiers at the 1936 Nuremberg Rally, September 1936." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/354110/original/file-20200821-20-1ewhjgx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nora Waln believed that it would be wrong to take a ‘binary view’ of Germans during the Nazi era.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Writing after <em>Kristallnacht</em> (but before the world knew about the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/final-solution-overview">Final Solution</a>), she seems to pre-empt accusations that she had been complicit in immoral Nazi policies: “I may be particularly stupid, but it never occurred to me when in Germany that I should continuously criticise the Nazis lest my silence be taken as a sign that I approved of all their activities.” After resisting the urge to categorise the Germans as either “good” or “bad” people for so long, the internal logic of this statement suggests that Waln was finally becoming prey to a kind of either/or thinking – either you oppose the regime constantly or you are complicit with its every policy.</p>
<h2>Culture war</h2>
<p>Waln’s statement raises serious questions today, not only because we know the full extent of Nazi atrocities, but also as we navigate our own current “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/21/culture-wars-risk-blinding-us-to-just-how-liberal-weve-become-in-the-past-decades">culture war</a>”. In the heated discussion of contemporary issues such as Britain’s imperial legacy, immigration policy, and justice for women and transgender people, we frequently hear that “silence is violence”. Does Waln’s memoir reinforce this message?</p>
<p>In some ways her nuanced approach is admirable. Waln tried to understand the historical and psychological impulses that led some Germans to choose the Nazi culture of domination. She also understood the terrible fear which made opposition impossible for so many. In this way, her memoir resists the rigid “<a href="https://brill.com/view/title/29843">victim/perpetrator</a>” binary that has structured post-war discussions of the Third Reich and Holocaust and offers a more humane view of Germany’s tragic slide into totalitarianism.</p>
<p>But Waln was later compelled to resist the Nazis more directly. According to her obituary in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/28/archives/nora-waln-dies-a-journalist-70-correspondent-also-wrote-books-about.html">New York Times</a>, she sent a copy of her memoir to the Nazi police chief Heinrich Himmler with an “insolent” inscription. In retaliation, he arrested seven of her friends’ children. Waln then offered herself as a hostage for their release. When Himmler offered to release the children if she would limit her writing on Germany to “romantic novels”, she refused. “If you make a bargain like that, God takes away the power to write. If you don’t tell the truth you lose your talent”, she wrote. </p>
<p>Waln may have been slow to speak out at first, but she ultimately refused to compromise with Nazism. Her admission in Reaching for the Stars that she could have acted sooner is a timely reminder to highlight injustice whenever we see it today. Perhaps, though, like Waln, we can do so in a way that resists the polarising approach of “us” and “them”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144833/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ellen Pilsworth receives funding from The British Academy and Wolfson Foundation.</span></em></p>The American journalist witnessed the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Her nuanced approach offers clues about reporting a polarised society.Ellen Pilsworth, Lecturer in German and Translation Studies, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1367302020-04-21T20:03:36Z2020-04-21T20:03:36ZSecrets and scandals: where Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir fits in the rich history of prime ministerial books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/329396/original/file-20200421-82654-7totml.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=532%2C0%2C3269%2C1994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Landing in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, it may seem strange former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir has generated so much political controversy.</p>
<p>Turnbull has been accused of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js06JnyNQO4">hypocrisy</a> and championing <a href="https://omny.fm/shows/ben-fordham-full-show/former-speaker-of-the-house-of-representatives-bro">socialism</a>, and has been <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/liberal-party-conservatives-want-immediate-expulsion-of-turnbull-20200419-p54l7h.html">threatened with expulsion</a> from the Liberal Party.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-former-prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull-on-his-autobiography-a-bigger-picture-136746">Politics with Michelle Grattan: Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on his autobiography, 'A Bigger Picture'</a>
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<p>In A Bigger Picture, <a href="https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-malcolm-turnbull-gives-his-very-on-the-record-account-of-scott-morrison-136693">Turnbull deals candidly with his antagonists</a> inside the Coalition, who fought him bitterly on the same-sex marriage reform and climate policy. Similarly, he names and shames those he blames for the leadership insurgency of August 2018. All of this was expected, but none of it must please the current government.</p>
<p>But is the book any more inflammatory than previous prime ministerial memoirs?</p>
<p>Political controversy is a trademark of political memoir publishing in Australia. A Bigger Picture is just another page in that story.</p>
<p>Until the 1960s, prime ministerial memoirs were the exception, not the rule. Between 1945 and 1990, just three former prime ministers chose to publish books about their political lives. Two of them – Billy Hughes and Robert Menzies – produced two books each, and both political veterans sought to avoid “telling tales out of school”. Both seemed more interested in foreign affairs, particularly our imperial relationship to the UK in the case of Menzies.</p>
<p>The dismissal of the Whitlam government provoked both Sir John Kerr and Gough Whitlam to publish their memoirs. After reading extracts of Kerr’s <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8961710?q&versionId=10375777">Matters for Judgement</a>, Whitlam decided to “set the record straight immediately” by writing <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-truth-of-the-matter-paperback-softback">The Truth of the Matter</a>. His second book, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8478914">The Whitlam Government</a>, was also designed to make a political splash. Promising to explain the “development and implementation” of his policy program, the book was timed for release on the tenth anniversary of the dismissal itself, ensuring maximum publicity.</p>
<p>Since then, political controversy has accompanied prime ministerial memoirs, in part because incumbent political parties and leaders have had a vested interest in how these books might affect their popularity.</p>
<p>In his 1994 <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11599888">political memoir</a>, Bob Hawke accused his rival and successor, Paul Keating, of calling Australia “the arse-end of the world” during an argument about the Labor leadership. Further, Hawke accused Keating of failing to support Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.</p>
<p>Keating, who was attacked in parliament in October 1994 over the claims, <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/118291291?searchTerm=%22Button%22%20AND%20%22Flying%20a%20Rhetorical%20Kite%22&searchLimits=">called both allegations</a> “lies”. Hawke offered to take a lie-detector test to prove his sincerity. Senior ALP figures recorded their outrage at Hawke’s memoir. But Hawke hit back, describing them as “precious self-appointed guardians of proper behaviour”.</p>
<p>Hawke’s predecessor also damaged his relationship with his own party in the process of publishing his memoirs. Malcolm Fraser’s <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/malcolm-fraser-paperback-softback">Political Memoirs</a>, written with journalist Margaret Simons, was recognised as one of Australia’s <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/political-presses-20101226-197ul.html">top ten books of 2010</a>. His outspokenness – in the book and in his post-prime-ministerial life more generally – earned him many attacks from Coalition MPs.</p>
<p>John Howard handled the politics of his memoirs better than most politicians. Though the book was antagonistic toward his former treasurer, Peter Costello, Howard promised to “deal objectively” with events and relationships in <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780730499640/lazarus-rising/">Lazarus Rising</a>. Ever the party stalwart, Howard and his publishers re-issued the book after the 2013 election with a new chapter that touted Tony Abbott’s “high intelligence, discipline […] good people skills”.</p>
<p>Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard both publicly took aim at one another in their memoirs, which made for plenty of media fodder. In <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/my-story-9781760893330">My Story</a>, Gillard described Rudd’s leadership as a descent into “paralysis and misery”. Rudd returned fire, calling her book her <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-24/kevin-rudd-dismisses-julia-gillard27s-memoir-as-a-work-of-27f/5767096">“latest contribution to Australian fiction”</a>. However, he was unable to dent the book’s commercial success.</p>
<p>Four years later, Rudd in <a href="https://kevinrudd.com/books/">The PM Years</a> accused Gillard of plotting “with the faceless men” to become prime minister. In a bid to patch over the historic rifts, he subsequently promised the Labor Party’s 2018 National Conference that the “<a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2018/12/18/kevin-rudd-life-membership-alp/">time for healing</a>” had come.</p>
<p>Critics of Turnbull’s book – such as Sky News’ Andrew Bolt and 2GB’s Ben Fordham – have argued that he and his publishers, Hardie Grant, were wrong to “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js06JnyNQO4">betray confidences</a>” and divulge “<a href="https://omny.fm/shows/ben-fordham-full-show/former-speaker-of-the-house-of-representatives-bro">private conversations</a>”.</p>
<p>In reality, political memoirs have always pushed against conventions of political secrecy. In the 1970s, British cabinet minister Richard Crossman <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/february/1485867600/mark-mckenna/character-business">published his Diaries</a>, which included detailed descriptions of how cabinet functioned. The British establishment subsequently conducted the <a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmpubadm/689/68905.htm">Radcliffe review</a> into political memoirs and diaries. It found such material should be kept secret for 15 years, but that civil servants could do little to stop their political masters from publishing.</p>
<p>In 1999, Australia’s Neal Blewett was warned that publishing his <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32639152?q&versionId=45870443">A Cabinet Diary</a>, recorded seven years earlier, could lead to prosecution under the Crimes Act because it revealed confidential cabinet discussions. Calling the public service’s bluff, Blewett published anyway. He explained in the book that “a few egos will be bruised, but cabinet ministers are a robust lot”. His diary shed significant light on the trials and tribulations of a ministerial life.</p>
<p>Since then, countless MPs and ministers have published books that claim to accurately represent personal conversations, some based on private notes (as Costello claimed in his memoirs), others on diary entries (as is the case in Turnbull’s book). In recent years, politicians have reproduced text messages and email exchanges in their books, as <a href="https://theconversation.com/gareth-evans-bob-learned-early-self-deprecation-is-for-dummies-25579">Bob Carr did</a> in his 2014 book, Diary of a Foreign Minister. In each version of history, the author is the essential policymaker.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-malcolm-turnbull-gives-his-very-on-the-record-account-of-scott-morrison-136693">View from The Hill: Malcolm Turnbull gives his very on-the-record account of Scott Morrison</a>
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<p>In his book, Turnbull reveals private conversations and WhatsApp exchanges with colleagues, world leaders, public servants and more. His accounts of cabinet discussions are hardly ground-breaking: cabinet debates about the economy and national security under the Abbott government, for instance, were thoroughly detailed in Niki Savva’s <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/the-road-to-ruin1">The Road to Ruin</a>, while the acrimonious debates about energy policy, same-sex marriage and home affairs inside the Turnbull government were laid bare in David Crowe’s <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460757963/venom-vendettas-betrayals-and-the-price-of-power/">Venom</a>. Similarly, Turnbull’s criticisms of News Corporation’s biased reporting have been aired elsewhere, and stop short of Rudd’s argument in The PM Years that Rupert Murdoch should be the subject of a royal commission.</p>
<p>Turnbull’s book is another addition to the history of incendiary political memoir publishing in Australia. Political parties and their media associates have confirmed once again that a successful parliamentary memoir requires deft political management.</p>
<p>Ultimately, A Bigger Picture is not the compendium of revelations that some may perceive. Instead, it is another picture of politics in which “character” and “leadership” reign supreme at the expense of all other political forces.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136730/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Black receives an Australian Government Research Training Program (AGRTP) scholarship for doctoral research.</span></em></p>Australia has a rich modern history of former prime ministers writing memoirs, partly to exact revenge and partly to secure their legacy as they see it. A Bigger Picture fits into that tradition.Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.