Book of the week
Meltwater by Suzanne Ashmore (Mary Egan Publishing, $30)
Harbouring a secret can hold us back from being true to ourselves. Sharing that secret can be transformative. But imagine if you have locked away so many awful secrets that you have to create numerous ‘‘other selves’’ to cope.
This is what happened to Meltwater protagonist Elizabeth – a character apparently very similar to the book’s author Suzanne Ashmore. Elizabeth has 13 different ‘‘selves’’ all created to hide her
shocking memories of abuse. It is only through unlocking these memories, revealing these secrets to the scrutiny of daylight by opening her ‘‘Glacial Diaries’’ and seeing the icy secrets melt away, that Elizabeth can find her true self and remove the fear and anxiety that has dogged her adulthood.
Through the voice of one of her personas – the sensible storyteller Beatrice – Elizabeth begins by recalling her childhood in rural Taranaki through a series of vivid childlike vignettes. Her father is a cruel, vindictive bully. When she is just 4 years old, he begins sexually abusing her, leading her to create the first of her other selves – one of
the 13 imagined characters who help her get through it.
Hannah steps in to take over the memory. But Hannah isn’t strong enough to ‘‘hold all the hurt’’ and when a second abuser manifests himself in the form of a priest, Anna, the next of Elizabeth’s others, arrives to help her deal with all the bad stuff. The other selves multiply with each hurtful episode. Anna is a wild child, making Elizabeth behave badly, shout, argue and throw things,and causing her mother wonder why she’d changed so much, almost overnight. But neither Elizabeth nor Anna, and especially not the gentle Hannah, are going to tell.
Her parents move to Christchurch and Elizabeth turns to other men in a fruitless search to be loved.
By the time Elizabeth is 18, she can no longer stand being at home and takes herself back to New Plymouth, to begin anew in the shadow of Mt Taranaki. But bad luck seems to follow her and, after one particularly horrific incident – we don’t find out what actually happened until much later – she reacts so badly she is sent to an asylum and eventually returns to her family in Christchurch to recover and somehow learn how to uncover her forgotten memories.
Meltwater is a brave memoir disguised as fiction that seems to have helped Ashmore write her way through trauma to find her identity, while ridding herself of unwanted, haunting ghosts. Ashmore’s skill as a writer is in making us want to come with her, and to see in Elizabeth’s many alter egos a flash of recognition in how we all try to bury unpleasant memories, and how our inner voices can shape what we do and say more than we’d care to admit.
Ashmore acknowledges the guidance and encouragement of iconic New Zealand author Sue Mccauley and her influence is evident in the compelling result.
– Felicity Price
Meltwater is a brave memoir disguised as fiction that seems to have helped Ashmore find her identity.