‘Telling the true story had changed my brain’
The Mirror Book: A Memoir, by Charlotte Grimshaw (RHNZ Vintage, $38)
In 2015, I interviewed Auckland writer Charlotte Grimshaw – a sharp-eyed chronicler of self-damaging characters – about her novel, Starlight Peninsula.
A clumsy attempt to ask about growing up with her writer father C.K. (Karl) Stead drew a bland response. Her childhood in the Hobson Bay villa, where her parents – Karl and his wife Kay, now in their late 80s – still live, sounded pleasant. She and her father, she added, ‘‘get on very well and we do our own thing and it works just fine’’.
Grimshaw’s neck was covered by a scarf, masking the scar from recent surgery to remove a lump on her thyroid gland. An alarming scare, but possibly useful for a future book. Things happen, make a story out of it, Karl had taught her: ‘‘It’s material.’’
It’s material all right, probably not as he would want it, for her new work.
The Mirror Book, a memoir (she is 55, with three adult children), is the most harrowing, profoundly moving work of her prolific career. It opens around the time of the neck surgery, an almost-trivial hiccup in the proximity of a marital breakdown and what she describes as the withdrawal of support from her parents, especially her mother.
‘‘Just after my marriage crisis, my mother stopped speaking to me,’’ she writes. Kay’s behaviour was nothing new in a series of estrangements through the years. But, says Grimshaw, Karl compounded the situation by refusing to believe it was even happening: ‘‘She speaks to you all the time,’’ he insisted.
Grimshaw and her husband reunited, but the dynamics had necessarily changed. She needed to examine why she was in such a precarious state, and therefore, she had to rip apart the ‘‘repressive’’ Stead family narrative. Karl and Kay could have helped. But, she writes, they refused to engage in what, for her, was a life-saving imperative.
Her scrutiny is loving and even-handed. But she concludes that the tightly controlled order imposed within the Stead household (the ‘‘jam’’ incident is a must-read) was all surface. While Kay was prone to shrieking and silences, Karl employed rage, evidence, his wife thought, of ‘‘his genius’’. His affairs were another source of anguish for the whole family.
Grimshaw could handle her father. But Kay’s affections, as her daughter became an adolescent, eluded her: ‘‘I wanted my mother to love me, and I desperately wanted to be good.’’ Instead, she recalls Kay and Karl repeatedly telling her she was bad. She began to behave accordingly, and it is heartbreaking to read.
Grimshaw divides the book into two sections, the first reflecting upon the anguished, danger-seeking persona she developed during her ‘‘bad’’ teen years and early 20s; the second devoted to the ‘‘adult Charlotte’s’’ careful facade as wife, mother and writer.
Now both have gone. ‘‘After a whole adult life, instead of remote and separated, I felt part of something,’’ she writes. ‘‘… Telling the true story had changed my brain.’’
The new incarnation of Charlotte Grimshaw, who now wants to treasure the good things from her childhood, signs off with a memory of pure joy so beautifully expressed it brings a lump – the best kind – to the throat.