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As I turned the corner at my half-way mark at the parking lot at Mahon’s Pool in Maroubra to run back to Coogee and took in, with a sort of breathlessness, the expanse of ocean that is the coastline of Lurline Bay on the clearest of winter days, it struck me today that there is almost enough beauty in the world to hold all of its pain. Philosophical insights are never summonsed, they do tend to sort of present themselves amidst runner’s cramp and the thought ‘if I don’t get a drink I am going to die.’ Between footfalls along the footpath, I became certain that if this world was only beauty, it would sicken us, like too many Max Brenner chocolate shots. If it were only pain, we would be squashed and defeated. Today I felt the design of it. The exquisite balance between the light and the dark.
This is the sense with which I have been left having just finished Virginia Lloyd’s moving memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement. I met Virginia serendipitously at a party a few weeks ago, and promptly went out to buy her book – I had read about it in the media, but I do not, as a whole, rush out to buy books about losing one’s life partner to cancer.
The Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement
If you have this same rather naïve aversion to reading something challengingly real, I urge you to push past it. It is simply a dull-witted bouncer preventing you from entering a splendid, beautifully written, torturously honest book delicately poised between unbearable loss and exquisite courage.
I have on occasion been called a book snob by my dear friend Lisa (who reads books about vampires having sex and such things that elude me) because I cannot – I will not - read shit no matter how many weeks it has spent on the best seller list. Bad writing kills me. I almost take it personally. I don’t mind reading a book on any topic if it is done with grace and care. And this book is nothing if not graceful and careful.
You will cry. This book will squeeze you at every tender point in your heart meridian. But it has been scripted with such a loving hand, your heart will also swell.
Virginia met John when she was 32, married him at 33 and was a widow at 34. She writes of caring for John while he died a painful death. But the beauty of this book is more than enough to hold this tender subject matter. Their life together was brief and top heavy with medical intervention and the ever-approaching, uncertain deadline of his demise. In the short time they had together they embraced that insight from which most of us live our lives eluded: that we are here to love and be loved.
After John’s death Virginia attends to the problem of the rising damp in her home that has been left for too long. The rising damp, like her grief must be attended to, gently allowed to be aired so that the integrity of the structure can be lovingly restored.
The narrative is gently sculpted, as Virginia examines what death has meant to her with searing honesty and as carefully as she chooses colours for her walls, a painting to honour John’s life and she faces her future without him.
I sobbed through a lot of this book, but with a kind of heightened awareness of the hard-won insights on offer. I watched my husband sleeping with new eyes having read the passage about how special mattresses and then eventually hospital beds divided Virginia from John from the simple act of lying head-to-head on pillows and looking into one another’s eyes.
I closed this book with gratitude for its reminder of the grace of each moment, the beauty of love at its most contested and battered, and the sinew of the heart, that can hold its own shattering and yet stand sturdy.
I adored this book. It is a gem.
www.virginialloyd.com
www.joannefedler.com
Every now and then I get acquisition-anxiety.
I look around at all I own and I feel burdened by the weight of the baggage I call my ‘possessions.’ When this happens, I go through all my clothes, my books, my jewelry, my crockery and cutlery and I have a huge spring-clean leaving a large pile of black bags outside St Vincents.
I am quite certain this anxiety is related to death, albeit tangentially. The thought of someone having to wade through all my ‘things’ when I finally kick the bucket feels like an onerous and rather selfish legacy to leave behind.
So this past Mothers’ Day I gave strict instructions to my family that I didn’t want anything. The only concession I did allow, given how driven people are to ‘spend money on’ us, especially on a consumer-fuelled day like Mother’s Day, was for a gift through Oxfam or World Vision. I was pretty sure some ‘mother’ out there in the Third World could do with a bag of rice or a goat or a mosquito net more than I needed another bottle of perfume or a Rebel sports voucher (despite my penchant for fancy running gear).
It has occurred to me more than occasionally that perhaps I am not Sydney-material. I am a girl from Africa, after all. We are all connected in this great energetic experience of life, and those who think otherwise have much bigger commitment issues than they imagine. It is possible for each of us to do ‘good’ in small (but ultimately big) ways without any major disruptions to plastic surgery, renovations or private schooling we may have planned.
They say of the hedgehog that it is a creature that is ‘innocent of its greatness.’ For this reason I am particularly fond of hedgehogs. Every now and then one meets a person who is, far from being filled with a sense of self-importance, very much like a hedgehog.
A few weeks ago, I met Adam Ordish, a young Australian lawyer, who together with his wife Rebecca, went to Kathmandu in Nepal in 2000 for five months to do some volunteer English teaching like many good young people with a social conscience and a sense of adventure.
I envy people who know what they are about and what their work is. Not many of us have a sense of utter clarity when it comes to our life’s purpose. So there is something compelling and confronting about people who have literally found their place in the world. And who, with every breath they take, are making it a better place – for others. Dear God we could do with a few more of those.
The difference between Adam and Rebecca and most other people who notch up life experiences for the old memoir, is that this experience fundamentally altered not only their perceptions but their actions. They did return to Sydney, to their jobs and a mortgage, but it was hard to take this middle-class existence and its concerns seriously after the poverty and the hardships they had seen and experienced in Nepal.
They returned to Nepal and set up the Mitrataa Foundation (mitrataa is the Nepalese word for friendship) a non-profit organization that is simply, beautifully committed to educating girls and women. Why the focus on females? Adam explains that research shows that a girl is more likely to do something with an education than a boy. And that a girl who is educated is more likely to ensure that her children are educated. Just like teaching a man to fish, you feed him for life, by educating a girl, you ensure a regenerative inter-generational commitment to learning.
Mitrataa works to fund scholarships for girls to go to school. So far the organization has fundraised for over 110 girls to go to school on the Dream Catchers scholarship scheme. Adam and Rebecca are also in the process of setting up a model school and have introduced Nepal’s first ‘Pets as Therapy’ program where animals are brought in to provide some touch therapy for children who have lost parents and who are starved of affection and cuddles. As I listened to Adam describe the first moment when some dogs were brought into the school and how the children shrieked (they’d never been that close to a dog before) but how the disabled children bonded with a dog that was paraplegic, having the use of only its two front legs, I came close to understanding how the smallest things can make the biggest difference.
Mitrataa has also initiated the Daisy Chains program, a women’s literacy, business mentoring and micro-finance program and a program for training women journalists in English. Libby Hathorn, the well-known Australian children’s author has been integrally involved in teacher-training and in introducing the 100Views Literacy and Art program. A documentary of her work with Mitrataa will be available shortly – and I will post further information about its screenings.
When I was a law student at Yale, we were addressed by a man who worked to save people from the death penalty in a poorly funded non-profit organization. He ended his presentation to our class of up-and-coming young lawyers by saying: ‘It is better to be about something and get nothing for it than to be about nothing and get something for it.’
Of course first prize would probably be to be about something and get something for it. But I am struck with awe and a sense of humility when I meet people who put their bodies where their mouths are. People who are not about themselves. Big Picture people. Hedgehog people.
In the next while, I will be doing what I can to promote the work of Mitrataa, which will include updates on this blog. If anyone out there has abundance-anxiety or consumer-fatigue and would like to provide a Nepalese girl with a scholarship to attend school for one year, all it will take is $300 to cover her school fees, books, uniform, stationery and incidentals.
I worked out I spend over $300 on daily skinny cappuccinos over a period of three months. While I will get my daily caffeine fix, nobody will learn to fish. And another Nepalese girl will get lost in domestic child labour, never to experience the joy of a mind that has been opened to the world through literacy.
Thank you to Libby Hathorn for introducing me to Adam.
And thank you to Adam and Rebecca for being the coolest hedgehog-folk I’ve met in a long time.
To learn more about Mitrataa’s work, go to www.mitrataa.org
www.joannefedler.com
When I was nineteen Tom Robbins was my favourite author – Even Cowgirls get the Blues, Still-life with Woodpecker and Jitterbug Perfume are still three of my all-time favourite books that made it onto my top shelf where I keep my gems. So I wrote him a letter telling him just how awesome I thought he was. I did so, knowing that all his books are dedicated to ‘all those whose letters I haven’t answered.’ I did so even though later books are dedicated ‘to all those whose letters I still haven’t answered.’ In my letter I told him I did not want to be included in the dedication of his next book.
And behold – Tom Robbins answered my letter. I quote his response: Dear Joanne, your kind words found their way to this distant outpost where they caused me some genuine pleasure and I thank you for that. I am sorry I don’t have time for a more adequate response, but I am up to my ears in the smoking juice of the universe. Yours, Tom Robbins.’
This was in the day of real proper letters on writing paper, not email. I still have that precious missive in my pile of precious missives and suchlike.
Tom Robbins
It has taught me that there is one golden rule when you are an author (no matter how busy you are or how far up yourself you are or how bogged down you are in the smoking juice of the universe): ANSWER YOUR FANMAIL.
Things Without A Name has been out for exactly six weeks now, and thank you to everyone who has bought it, read it and especially those of you who have delighted me with emails telling me how much you have loved it. Every time someone bothers to tell me how much they cried, or laughed or just couldn't put it down, I am renewed with a sense of purpose it is so easy to lose in this career which feels more like an experiment in eking out a living while paradoxically living the dream.
I lived with that book for so long as a solitary companion, feeding it, whispering to it quietly, and to have it out there in the public domain makes me feel both vulnerable and proud, like a mother parading her newborn. It is my absolute joy and delight to answer each and every email or letter personally.
Recently I read Steve Toltz’s fantastic book A Fraction of The Whole. I loved it so much, I went to his website and sent him some fanmail.
But Steve has obviously not heard of the golden author rule.
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When you are unpublished, being published seems like the ultimate achievement. When you are published, getting publicity is the difference between your book being a success and not.
My publicist has been struggling to get any kind of reviews for Things Without A Name because the market is apparently flooded with fiction at the moment, which is rather a pity for writers like me, who spill their life and sweat and tears into a project over a period of two years, only to be told, ‘sorry, it’s not a good time for fiction.’ Fuck, I am so over the marketing aspect of publishing. You can deliver your best work and you are at the mercy of a marketing strategy over which you have no control and a publicity campaign in which you are nothing but a number in a line of other authors who equally have spent years of their lives working on their masterpiece that may or may not get their moment in the sun
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A few weeks ago I went to my osteopath. A young man in his early twenties did the pre-manipulation massage. During the half hour in which he gently kneaded the various places in my back that had crocheted themselves into a knot, he told me that he was in fact about to go into the army.
Now I am fascinated by young men who actually want to go into the army. It has something to do with the fact that growing up in South Africa, young men were conscripted and had no choice about going into the army and fighting (and often dying) in Angola and other places they had no desire to visit with an AK47 in their hand. It also has something to do with my own incomprehension at a desire to experience all that violence, to inflict all that death, and to learn to live with the fear of losing your own life as if it were your own breath
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It was metaphor’s fault. It changed my mind about everything. It made me want to be a wordsmith. To do that with language. Illuminate it from the inside, make it pulse.
It was truly love at first sight
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To promote the release of my new book Things without A Name, we’re hosting a writing competition, the details of which you can find up on my website: www.joannefedler.com (click on competition).
Things Without A Name
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You have to have a sense of humour if you are blind. Come to think of it, a sense of humour is useful no matter whether one can see or not, but if you are in the habit of walking into trees, it is useful, to have a sense of humour. So said Charlie, as I drove him to my children’s school on Thursday morning. Charlie is, and has been, blind for a while, having suffered with undiagnosed glaucoma as a young man. He was coming to talk to the Year K students, on the subject of uh… being blind.
I met Charlie through a wonderful man, Ellis who heads up the Sydney chapter of Achilles, a running club that pairs up able-bodied and physically-impaired people so they can run together. Achilles' mission statement is: To enable people from all walks of life, including those with physical impairments, to enjoy the health giving benefits of walking and running in a supportive, social and encouraging environment.
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Some days I can write no wrong. Everything I write seems to perfectly fit with the sense I have of what I want to convey, the way two lovers bodies will lie as if crafted to fit together as spoons of flesh.
On other days, ‘(i)t is impossible to say just what I mean.’ (T S Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, 1917) no matter that the English language is overcrowded with words like commuters on the New York underground
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Mortality is the sting in motherhood.
Yesterday, I was standing at my favourite coffee bar, having nipped out to get some lunchbox goodies for my son, waiting for my skinny cuppacino, glancing through the newspaper, as one does, while I was waiting for my barrista to do his thing with the frothed milk, tears pouring down my face
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Comment by Joanne Fedler
on Read, weep and celebrate: The Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement
Secret Writers Business
When you are ready, this book will be here. I wish you strength in this time. I hope that the beauty in the world falls at your feet, like rose-petals,
Jo
Raven
This book is one of those books I wish I could share with everyone - someday we will all have to face the loss of someone we love. And this book shines a light in this dark place.
Jo