Heart-felt exploration of an unwanted stage of life
SO FAR FOR NOW
So far for now is a meticulously crafted collection, a series of essays that explore the huge life lived so far by that master of New Zealand literature, Dame Fiona Kidman. Framed by the measured-yet-moving account of her husband’s fatal fall and the poignantyet-practical contemplation of the widowhood that has followed, the collection pays tribute to a truly great marriage, the celebration and loss of which ripples across every page but also reveals, both within and beyond, that relationship.
Kidman emerges life-size from her words: spirited, adventurous, loud and constant in her demands for justice, quietly determined in her quest for truth, honest in her admission of vulnerability and of pain. The book’s first section, “Mine Alone”, brings into focus the locations and human histories that have shaped Kidman’s own identity. “About Grandparents” touches on the troubling question of home that confronts those New Zealanders, like Kidman, whose European ancestors, displaced by oppression and famine, crossed the world in hope or desperation to start new lives in New Zealand. But of course, as Kidman puts it, “One displacement sets the scene for another.”
Other pieces in the section recall Kidman’s search for the first house of her infancy, found in Hawera, the tragicomic trials and joys of two years during which her parents attempted to farm in Waipu, and the complex relationship that she formed with that place which, along with a house on a hillside in Hataitai, she also calls home.
“The Outsiders” brings together the stories of individuals to whom Kidman has felt some extraordinary degree of commitment. Research into the life and death of Albert Black, subject of This Mortal Boy, led her to the streets of Belfast, and less glamorously into “the swamps and pines” of Waikumete Cemetery; her unmitigated passion for Marguerite Duras carried her to Saigon and Hanoi, to the Mekong River and to Montparnasse — and another cemetery.
The “Going South” section includes At Pike River, an informative account of Kidman’s own involvement in the battle to halt the sealing of the mine and to continue the process of investigation and accountability. She interrogates New Zealand’s questionable record on women’s reproductive rights in Playing with Fire, an essay in “The Body’s Sweet Ache”. Kidman also explores life as a writer, and as a teacher of memoir writing, a participant in literary festivals, a writing fellow in Otago, even as an unproductive prisoner of Covid’s great lockdown.
“This New Condition”, the final section of essays, concludes instead with Kidman’s invaluable reflection, On Widowhood, a frank and very personal exploration of the many challenges presented by this unwelcome and under-discussed phase of life. Heart-rending and humorous by turns, Kidman confronts such issues as repelling gold diggers, dining alone, removing the ring and, eventually, realising that there can still be perfect days. The ache of her loss never lessens but it appears, in these final pages, alleviated by a reflective calm, perhaps part of what the author describes as “one of the gifts of age — a softening round the edges, an acceptance of how things have gone”.
This gentle acceptance, however, is belied by the sustained energy and appetite for life and work that emanates from the writings of this collection. There is grace, certainly, in Kidman’s reconciliation to the conditions in life she cannot change but in no sense has she surrendered to age. On the contrary, in So far for now, she has mastered it.
A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com.