Last week the shortlisted writers for the National Biography Award gathered in the State Library of NSW. Congratulations to the winner, Behrouz Boochani for his book No Friend but the Mountains, written on Manus Island where he has been detained as a Kurdish refugee for six years. No Friend but the Mountains also took out the top prize at the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Title: No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison
Author: Behrouz Boochani (translated by Omid Tofighan)
Publisher: Picador Australia
Date: 2018
Pages: 416
ISBN: 978-1760555382
While I have yet to read his book, I have read one of the other books short-listed for the National Biography Award and highly recommend it. It is Rozanna Lilley’s Do Oysters Get Bored? Another memoir I have really enjoyed reading is Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics.
Title: Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life
Author: Rozanna Lilley
Publisher: UWA Publishing
Date: 2018
Pages: 217
ISBN: 978-1-74258-963-3
I had the pleasure of attending the launch of Do Oysters Get Bored? at the Newtown bookshop, Better Read than Dead. The book is a collection of biographical essays and poems. The essays explore memories of Rozanna Lilley’s childhood with her parents who were both famous literary figures (Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley), and of her adult life with her husband as they parent Oscar, their son with autism. The pieces are funny and tender and immensely sad. The poems in the second half of the book are heart-breaking. They evoke the hurt and bewilderment of a young girl who became sexual prey for the bohemian friends of her parents.
Rozanna’s more recent life makes for equally interesting reading. Her first marriage made way for a second with a wise and supportive man and the challenge of raising their autistic son. Her description of family holidays with the three of them contain much loving humour. She also writes about caring for her father in his final years and her relationship with this eccentric and sometimes violent man.
Through all of these memories, with their comedy and tragedy, the wry, confident, and always curious voice of Rozanna Lilley guides the reader through the emotional ups and downs of her life. Her powers of observation and lyrical writing make reading this hybrid book of prose and poetry an absolute delight.
Title: The Erratics
Author: Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Publisher: Finch Publishing
Date: 2018
Pages: 217
ISBN: 978-0648100850
The Erratics won the Finch Memoir Prize in 2018 and the Stella Prize in 2019. At an author talk in the Blue Mountains I attended soon after the book was published, one of the judges for the Finch Prize introduced Vicki Laveau-Harvie, saying that she had been bowled over by the dry humour in the first chapter of the book. The ability to convey the absurdity of some confronting situations is a key feature of The Erratics.
The book tells of a recent part of the author’s life in which the author and her sister set out to rescue their 90-year-old father from his home in a remote part of Alberta, Canada near the Erratics, large boulders fallen from the mountains to dot the plains. He is being kept there by the sisters’ difficult mother.
The first chapter describes the sisters’ encounter with their mother in a nursing home. She has broken her hip. Here is an example of her humour from the first page:
My sister unhooks the chart from the foot of my mother’s bed and reads.
My mother is not in the bed. My sister takes her pen, which is always to hand, around her
neck or poked into a pocket and, with the air of entitlement of a medical professional, writes MMA in large letters at the bottom of the chart.
MMA
Mad as a meat-axe.
With such an opening there is no way I could stop reading. The story reaches back into the author’s girlhood. Her pain and puzzlement over her mother’s cruelty to her children and her husband remain even after the rescue is complete. Despite the damage of her childhood, Vicki Laveau-Harvie emerges from the book as a woman who has developed emotional resilience through her sense of the ridiculous and through the therapeutic process of crafting a short but evocative memoir.