I’d Rather Not
The Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde said we can be in the gutter but look to the stars. The Melbourne-based writer and humorist Robert Skinner agrees on the location but what he sees is the gutter. “Say what you want about rock bottom,” he writes in his whimsical, insouciant memoir I’d Rather Not, “but at least it’s sturdy.”
Skinner’s grin-and-bear-it attitude runs through this book, which is his first. Yet I suspect he, too, is looking heavenwards, even if in secret. He writes about his time editing The Canary Press, “Australia’s greatest (and possibly only) short story magazine”, between 2013 and 2016.
He published Australian writers including Maxine Beneba Clarke and A.S. Patrić, who went on to win the Miles Franklin, and international authors such as Dave
Eggers. Yet the magazine made no money
“in the beginning, middle or end”. “I … wrote resignation letters, but I never knew who to send them to. I sent one to my mum, who said she liked the characters but didn’t understand the ending.”
That gently funny line is characteristic of Skinner’s self-deprecating humour. The book opens with the author, at 28, deciding that when it comes to work, he’d rather not. This is easier said than done, as he learns from the Centrelink “dole officer”. “People, I’ve found, want you to be busy. Genghis Khan could move into your street and people would say, ‘Well, at least he’s working.’ ”
What follows are jobs and regular escapes from them. In one of the best chapters, the author is on a camel trek with his parents and the ungulates are unco-operative. “I walked over to the holding pen to see if maybe I had a magic touch with camels. This is the persistent dream of dilettantes: that we will, at some point, uncover a superpower that will make sense of lives filled with false starts, failures and endless dabblings.”
Skinner’s stories have been published in The Monthly and his work has been included in The Best Australian Essays and Best Australian Comedy Writing. Being a writer in Australia is hard work. Being a comic writer is even harder. That our only award for humour writing, the biennial Russell Prize, was established only eight years ago is an unfunny truth.
One of the challenges is that not all funny bones are the same. Mine was lightly tickled by this slender book that could be a stand-up routine in a pub. Others may shake, rattle and roll.
Black Inc, 176pp, $27.99
Dementia has been in the spotlight in recent times, largely because an ageing population has made the disease unignorable. Indeed, we have seen the labelling of a new generation – the “sandwich generation” – to recognise a cohort of middle-aged people caught between caring for their growing children and their ageing parents. Cynthia Dearborn’s The Year My Family Unravelled is a personal account of the challenges of caregiving for the elderly, though in Dearborn’s case she finds herself sandwiched between two countries, Australia and the United States, and two phases of her life, the functional one of her present and the dysfunctional one of her childhood.
The memoir begins with Dearborn learning her father, who lives in Seattle, has had heart bypass surgery. She finds herself in “a freefall of fury and fear – as if in a world devoid of Dad, I too would cease to exist”. It is the first sign not only of the fate of Dearborn’s father, who develops vascular dementia, but also of the vulnerability of Dearborn herself in relation to him. Five years later, Dearborn leaves Australia for the US, where her father’s dementia is deteriorating, hoping to resettle him and her stepmother into a care home. She forsakes her partner and stalls her career to re-engage with a man who is congenial but also enigmatic and volatile: “loving, loveable, violent”.
Films such as Still Alice (2014) and The Father (2020) have represented dementia and the burdens of caregiving, but Dearborn’s memoir is unique and precious for its