Speaking ill of the dead
A mother’s suicide prompts questions, both personal and journalistic.
When journalist Nikki Gemmell’s elderly mother was found dead in her flat, Gemmell instinctively knew she’d taken her own life. Her poignant book about the aftermath opens with a gripping scene in which Gemmell is called to the basement of a Sydney morgue to identify Elayn – once a vivacious, beautiful woman – now cold flesh on an anonymous slab.
“We were not prepared,” she writes,
“for the beautiful model’s mouth slightly open, askew, the mouth that had already set itself awry through rigor mortis even then, so soon.”
Elayn’s once-glamorous world had shrunk into the confines of her bleak flat, after unsuccessful foot surgery left her in crippling, debilitating pain and she became addicted to the opioid painkiller oxycodone. She had taken her own life using a combination of pills and Bailey’s Irish Cream, which she ordered online.
Complex, vain and frequently cruel, Elayn had a tortured relationship with her daughter, who is one of Australia’s top writing talents. Gemmell chose to live overseas for decades to escape the
judgmental ire of her mother.
After traces the devastating aftermath of Elayn’s suicide and the whirlwind of grief, confusion and guilt Gemmell experiences as she attempts first to piece together the last few months of her mother’s increasingly miserable life and then to investigate the moral, legal and ethical implications of euthanasia in Australia.
Gemmell’s mother would memorise bad reviews of her books and quote them verbatim.
Gemmell is a writer at the top of her game, never stronger than when mining the intimacies of her personal life and relationships. The mother-daughter relationship is rich and disturbing.
Elayn enacts cruelties towards Nikki as a child that make her very difficult to like – among other things, she called the teenage Nikki “ugly” and “stupid”.
But Gemmell herself is a warm, intriguing storyteller, whose tumultuous inner life propels the story as she struggles to keep her work and family life afloat while dealing with her own grief.
Despite its sober subject matter, After is a gripping, compulsive read, and the central relationship is both repellent and highly relatable. I lent this book to my mother and she, like me, devoured it in a day, seduced by Gemmell’s luminous prose and bracing honesty.
For days, we discussed the confounding relationship between Gemmell and Elayn and why Elayn harboured such bitterness for her daughter – she would memorise bad reviews of Gemmell’s books and quote them back to her verbatim.
“Elayn’s narrative from childhood to old age was characterised by audacious disruption,” writes Gemmell.
“Erasures of a younger, more pliant self. Her existence was never quietly clearing its throat but banging on the table, roaring to be heard. It was a life of reinvention and transformation, of moving on and breaking free, and it ended as she was sailing into insignificance, in a flat in Sydney, with great determination and grit and enormous, bloody-minded loneliness. And I will never recover from it.”
I shed tears for every chapter of this exacting, beautiful book. It was a memorable and thought-provoking read.