BETWEEN A WOLF AND A DOG

Georgia Blain finally began editing this book after resting it to take care of her mother, writer Anne Deveson, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Written several years ago, when Blain picked it up again, she had no notion that she would be diagnosed with incurable brain cancer (last November) – the same aggressive illness we discover “Wolf’s” matriarchal character is living with at the start of this book. Set across one day and seen through the eyes of daughter Ester, a therapist, neither she nor elder sister April, a once famous singer, has any idea that mother Hilary has a brain tumour. A resonant Sydney family (Ester’s late father was a famous painter, Hilary’s an abstract filmmaker), the unit was rocked by an a air between Ester’s husband and April. Untidy April “colonised every space within moments of arriving”, Hilary observes of her “messy, beautiful daughter”. Unaware of limited time together, April watches Hilary’s most recent film; flickering snapshots of family life. “You always capture something – the elusive that you try to hold and can’t,” April tells her mother. And so has Blain captured the elusive moment when it’s time to forgive, when there’ s no more time for fighting.