Justin Heazlewood Get Up Mum
Justin Heazlewood – best known as the ARIA award-nominated comedian The Bedroom Philosopher – had his very first bad memory aged six. His mother told his nan and pop they’d never see their grandchild again. With the little boy bawling, she dragged him to the car, slammed the door and drove off.
It could have just been a family argument. Yet there are many more, and far worse, memories and fights to come. Get Up Mum is Heazlewood’s account of a childhood marked by his mother’s crippling mental illness.
Written through the eyes of his 12-yearold self, in 1992, in Burnie, Tasmania, Get Up Mum follows The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries and Funemployed, which tracked the pitfalls and joys of working as an artist. Desperate for his mother’s love, Heazlewood navigates the pitfalls of adolescence, from girls he likes to his first day at a new school to making sure his mother takes her pills.
When well, his mother is caring, fun and committed, even as she struggles to support the two of them on just a pension.
Yet too often she is sick; we later learn she has schizophrenia. She laughs hysterically, swears uncontrollably (“Bitch! Sssssss... TROLLOP!”), and hears voices in her head. Worse, for the young Heazlewood at least, are the days when she refuses to get out of bed: “She’s lying on her side with her eyes open. What Mum is doing is worse than sleeping in. It’s worse than being lazy. It’s nothing!”
In Get Up Mum, Heazlewood conjures up the frustrations of a child who understands both too much and too little, and for whom humour becomes a coping mechanism. Peppered with handwritten letters, diary entries, diagrams, doodles and drawings, the book is presented intentionally like the scrawlings of a schoolboy.
The poetry interspersed throughout, however, brings a sense of retrospective, even if it can feel a little heavy-handed. Heazlewood’s liberal use of exclamation marks, while conveying his boyish enthusiasm, can also be offputting.
Yet he does evoke what it is like to live in a loving, if flawed, family. In particular, his nan and pop – the latter the closest he has to a father – jump off the page as beacons of stability. Ultimately, if Get Up Mum is about youth, it is also about growing up too fast. Told to be a man while still a boy, Heazlewood feels responsible for his mother. Maybe, then, this is his way of finally letting go.