Top of the class
A debut collection of personal essays tells a relatable comingof-age story.
Some grumps have complained that Victoria University Press, which often dominates the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, is publishing too many volumes by young alumni of the creative writing MA at Victoria’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Though that may be an argument to unpick, VUP has just published books by three grads who very much deserve it: Eamonn Marra (a novel), Freya Daly Sadgrove (poetry) and Madison Hamill (essays).
Hamill is a standout. The 24-year-old has included 16 essays in her first book, Specimen. Each of the 16 is a distinct entity (with some overlap in subject matter here and there), but together, they form a cohesive coming-of-age story. Hamill looks back at her former selves – and through
this, it seems, comes to better understand herself. She writes, for instance, about her flirtation with shoplifting and her childhood withdrawal into stories she constructed in her head. “I returned to the real world when required, and it was like being woken up roughly.”
One relatable essay recounts how, at school camp, she tried to hide getting her first period. “If I never left this portaloo, everything would be fine.” Half of us have been there, right? (Not necessarily on a portaloo.)
There are different levels of honesty and frankness in any memoir. The things you choose to leave out are, arguably, as important as the things you choose to leave in.
Hamill never definitively says she’s asexual but devotes a 27-page essay primarily to this topic, including her list of 10 online hits for the word “asexual”. Through this essay, called “I Will Never
Hit on You”, she helps deconstruct
stereotypes about asexuality – something that may be more common than you think. “It’s like this,” she writes. “You are 22. So far, you have assumed that these stories about sexual attraction are an exaggeration, a kind of cultural conceit.”
Some of Hamill’s most compelling writing comes when she is at the periphery of a situation, observing and imagining. Take her stint as a psychology intern (well, an intern for an intern) in a South African hospital where she is barely tolerated by staff. At an appointment, a woman in intense psychological and physical pain – she feels like there’s a sword in her stomach – is told by a jaded doctor to tick boxes on some lists. “After a while she began to think she was just imagining her illness after all, because none of the things on the list seemed exactly right, although they always seemed about half right as if they described a televised version of her.”
As for the title? At school, Hamill became attached to a stillborn goat fetus preserved in a jar, with his umbilical cord still attached. Her book’s cover image depicts a woman suspended in a jar of fluid, her umbilical cord attached, too. In the end, we’re all specimens, to be eyeballed and sometimes dissected.
“You are 22. So far, you have assumed that these stories about sexual attraction are an exaggeration, a kind of cultural conceit.”