ten deranged girls and a dog walk home

TEN DERANGED GIRLS AND A DOG WALK HOME ROMANA DALGLEISH BACHELOR OF ARTS (ENGLISH) SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR BACHELOR OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS (HONOURS) SUPERVISOR: DR. FRANCESCA RENDLE-SHORT RMIT UNIVERSITY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. LOOSELY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PAGE 1

2. TIGERLILY (800) PAGE 8

3. THE END (200) PAGE 11

4. WHERE YOU AND I PAGE 12

5. INTRODUCTION TO NOT KNOWING (1900) PAGE 16

6. TAXI AND I KILLED A DOG (1700) PAGE 24

7. THE PAST UNDER CONSTRUCTION PAGE 31

8. FORTY DEGREE SUMMER (600) PAGE 36

9. PASSING IT ALONG (900) PAGE 39

10. SPEAKING FOR YOU PAGE 42

11. IN THE QUIET (500) PAGE 47

12. THE PSYCHIATRIC SUPERHERO (700) PAGE 50

13. REARRANGING MEMORY PAGE 54

14. MARCHING DOWN SWANSTON (100) PAGE 59

15. NAKED IN HIS BED (100) PAGE 60

16. WET COAT (50) PAGE 61

17. THE FRAGMENTS PAGE 62

18. LOVE STORY (600) PAGE 64

19. MANIA (50) PAGE 67

20. THE PULL (700) PAGE 68

21. THREATENING THE FUTURE PAGE 71

22. IT’S NOT FUNNY (25) PAGE 75

23. GOING HOME (1800) PAGE 76

24. POSSUMS (25) PAGE 84

25. DRAWING A LINE PAGE 85

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ABSTRACT Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home explores

the relationship between the memoirist and her various

constructions of self through “sudden memoir”. In this project I

have considered my practice of narrative nonfiction writing with

a focus on questions of ethics and truth telling.

In an attempt to disrupt the reading of the “sudden memoirs”

and to force the reader to question the construction of

nonfiction narrative, I have interrupted the creative work with

exegetical analysis. The exegesis functions as a response

to the practice-based research as well as working with the

creative work to tell a larger story.

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STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP This project contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any tertiary institution, and to the best of my knowledge, contains no material previously written by another person, except where due reference has been made. ………………………… Romana Dalgleish 19th of October 2012

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I desperately owe thanks to my supervisor Francesca Rendle-Short. Not only were you incredibly supportive, our weekly meetings were always exhilarating and the thought of letting you down kept me going when my motivation flailed. Course coordinator Adrian Miles and Nonfiction lab tutor David Carlin, you challenged me on my assumptions and brought me back down to earth when I got a bit carried away. Without the three of you I would have wandered around in useless circles. Thank you. The Nonfiction Lab and the regular characters in the Honours Studio: I loved seeing your projects come together, you were such a lovely group to be a part of. Taxi; thanks bruv for drawing the front cover. Thanks to everyone else who listened to my constant chatter and worry, friends and strangers alike. Thanks family, even Dad whose response to almost any situation all year has been ‘why don’t you have a sudden memoir about it?’ – very helpful. My demented family and the deranged girls that I love, Quick and Pigeon, and all the characters that got away, you are the world that I have tried to share in these short stories – it wouldn’t be sunshiney or worth writing about without you. ps. Thanks for not suing.

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TWO SEPARATES We were two separates, and safe in our isolation. Then the

pact, sealed with nightime roaming, threw away the distance.

We laughed, willingly tying knots, blindly sewing skin to skin.

The needles mum gave me when I left home dragging the

dyed hair we used as thread, pulling through me and into you,

then back again.

Do It Yourself. We didn’t want what everyone else had. But

your hands aren’t made for building and I’m no good at

following instructions.

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TEN DERANGED GIRLS AND A DOG WALK HOME

1. LOOSELY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home can be read as a nostalgic goodbye to late adolescence from a variety of voices, written over the course of a year. The objective of this project is to question the ways in which the memoirist makes sense of the past and interprets the present through story telling. This work binds together moments from my life in order to critically analyse the construction of personal narrative.

Early in my research I came across “sudden memoir” being discussed in Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist where he describes it as an “assault on the present by the present and its colleague, an almost current past” (80). This type of writing appealed to me in its immediacy, its fervour, and its abruptness. Larson does not give time constraints for sudden memoir; he defines it as “examin[ing] the most recent life phase” (79) and adds that “many [memoirists] are writing of the immediate past, even the still-corruptible present, not waiting for time to ripen or change what they know” (16).

In questioning why the sudden memoirist feels a compulsion to write about life as it happens I came across Eakin’s Living Autobiographically which discusses philosopher Strawson’s belief that “events in [his] remote past didn’t happen to [him]” (10). Strawson believes that his identity is discontinuous and that he therefore “cannot access previous identity states; he cannot reexperience or reinhabit them” (9). In my sudden memoirs I have used this notion of discontinuous identity as a

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constraint for “suddenness”, where the memoirist must tell her story before it becomes the story of a previous version of herself.

Once I realised I wanted to focus my project on writing sudden memoir I emailed Larson for confirmation that it was his term. He said that it was and that I should read Woolf’s Moments of Being. Like Woolf I am interested in moments that feel important even as they happen; what she calls “moments of being” (70). Larson credits Woolf with establishing “the interconnectedness of past and present in the act of memoir writing” (32). He goes on to say that he believes the memoirist needs to be “attentive to the interplay of the story and [her] remembering the story” in her work (33). This interconnectedness has come to define my work and my interpretation of sudden memoir where the past is brought into the present when it is re-imagined or reinterpreted. Larson believes that it is vital for memoirists to “honestly explore how they recall the past” (25) and I have been conscientious in my construction of sudden memoir to highlight the tensions of nonfiction writing as I have come up against them in the process of writing Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home.

By immersing myself in writing sudden memoir I wanted to bypass having to deal with the tendency of memory to rewrite experience subconsciously. Larson writes that with sudden memoir the memoirist is “in large part freed from the tyranny of memory” (80) and that sudden memoir “avoids the hindsight of age and captures something before memory can edit it” (79). Larson believes that with sudden memoir “the story

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commands us to write it as a way of sentencing it to memory” (80). By writing about things close to the time in which they take place, memory is invariably shaped by the carefully worded sentences that the memoirist uses to narrate these moments. With sudden memoir the memoirist takes agency in determining how she remembers what happened and how it felt. In “Gower’s Memory” Sacks writes that “there is no way of apprehending reality except by ‘constructing’ it, and constructing it in accordance with one’s views and values at the time” (62). With sudden memoir, unlike with memoir, the memoirist is likely to construct her story with similar understanding of what happened as the self that experienced it.

Although sudden memoir reduces the distance between the “I” who experiences the event and the “I” who writes about it, there are still, as Shields has put it, “two of us” (84). In “Persona” Shields distinguishes between these two versions of the self: “I am a chronicler of this character [ ... ] who is, but in the necessary sense not, me” (84). The space between the memoirist and the character representing the memoirist inside the narrative remains unbridgeable, even in sudden memoir. By the time the memoirist begins to write, the immediate emotional response of the experiencing self has passed, the initial confusion has dissipated; the memoirist simultaneously remembers and interprets what happened to her in her very recent past.

In telling our stories there is so much happening on a subconscious level with memory, identity construction and choices about how to represent the people we write about,

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that I thought it necessary to implement techniques in my work that force the reader to question what it is that they are reading. In this project I have disrupted the reading of the sudden memoir through characterisation and the names of my characters. The character that best represents me inside this work is called Telephone. Her boyfriend, who closely resembles mine, is Quick. Telephone’s closest friends are Taxi and Elevator. Readers have told me that these names can be alienating but I like that. I like the idea that readers do not immediately feel they know my characters, because they do not. In the exegetical chapters it is not always clear where I am referring to a character inside a creative piece and where I am referring to the person the character depicts because sometimes I am not sure where one ends and the other begins. Because of this blurring I have found it necessary to make sure that the reader is repeatedly reminded that these are not real people, these are strange puppet shadows of the people around which I exist.

There are great differences of opinion about what memoir is and how it should be defined. In Memoir: A History, Yagoda discusses memoir as “a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author’s life” (1). While this definition is overly simplistic, it describes some readers’ expectations. In The Situation and the Story, Gornick describes memoir as a “work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom”

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(91). Unlike Yagoda, Gornick engages with the issues of narrative construction that are central to memoir. This thinking of Gornick’s appears to be more in line with Larson’s, who notes that “memoir is getting more comfortable with its niche beside fiction and within the sphere of narrative” (104). Sudden memoir, as a subset of memoir, also belongs beside fiction within the sphere of narrative. This “niche” has been evasive when it comes to regulation. Scandals have occurred, such as when Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Yagoda 47) and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (Yagoda 2) were exposed as being fictional, and when Gornick admitted that she had merged scenes from her life to advance plot in her memoir Fierce Attachments (“Truth in Personal Narrative” 9). Memoirists walk a fine line when they attempt to convey their interpretation of the delicate chaos of experience. When something is published as nonfiction, readers seem to take it to heart.

The tensions between definitions and expectations in memoir have led Gornick to argue that “memoir writing is a genre still in need of an informed readership” (“Truth in Personal Narrative” 10). In an attempt to deal with this problem of readership in Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home, and wanting to keep my readers as “informed” as possible, I have disrupted the reading of these sudden memoir pieces by interleaving the exegetical chapters between them. These exegetical chapters ask the reader to consider the narrative construction of the whole work by articulating my thinking from the writing process.

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In Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home the “sudden” goes further than just acting as a constraint for the creative work. The “sudden” has extended into the exegetical chapters, which are an active part of this project. My Supervisor (who has been capitalised because she too has become a character in my work) has suggested the term “sudden exegesis” to describe what I am trying to do here. These exegetical chapters are to be read alongside the sudden memoir, not afterwards, in a separate sitting. The overall structure of Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home has implications for the reading of the creative work, where the weaving of narrative fragments with literary theory, textual analysis and context from my life outside these stories explores what it is that we do when we construct personal narrative. By interspersing the exegetical amongst the personal narrative, and by forcing the reader to fall in and out of them both, the exegetical interacts with the creative, and invites the reader into the construction of this collection of sudden memoirs. I have also included a rough word count for each creative piece in brackets next to the title. This functions as another reminder for the reader that these works are a construct. The word count acts as another interruption in reader’s attempt at suspending their disbelief.

This disruption of reading as well as the blurring of boundaries between the personal narrative and the exegetical chapters can be read as a form of fictocriticism. Nettlebeck, in her introduction to The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism, discusses how in fictocritical writing “the

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‘distance’ of the theorist/critic collides with the ‘interiority’ of the author” (12). Not only does my work play with authorial voice, it establishes a framework where the reader is constantly reevaluating the intentions of the memoirist. In Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-criticism Flavell writes that fictocriticism is invested “in the boundaries between factuality/creativity, objectivity/subjectivity, confession and criticism” (21). This exploration of form has found its way into my work where the exegetical chapters take on the role of an over arching narrative; holding the separate creative works together, giving them context and a depth of meaning that the individual stories are not capable of in isolation.

In choosing to present the creative and the exegetical in one body of work I am asking you to approach my project-based-research in an unexpected way. I have disrupted your reading, but to read either the creative or the exegetical in a void would be to bypass the accumulation of experience that exists in the space between the creative and the exegetical narrative.

You are about to read 2. Tigerlily; the first creative piece. It is a story about a mother nearly losing her child during her pregnancy. Do not be nervous, dear reader, it is a gentle story; I am easing you in.

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2. TIGERLILY (800)

Telephone walked downstairs to make a tea. She boiled

the kettle while Gaia vacuumed the living room floor. Gaia

didn’t want tea.

Before her daughter could get away she asked Telephone

what she was working on. Telephone was trying to write

an essay on the rights of gay parents. She said to her

mother, It sounds awful. It sounds like from the moment

you know you’re going to have a baby you’re scared. Gaia

said something about something and then told her daughter

about her own fear. She said, When I was pregnant with you,

The Captain was working at sea. He would have six weeks

at home with me, then six weeks away. We were living on

Mount Wellington and it was cold and I was on my own a

lot. One day, when I was five months pregnant, I started

bleeding. There was no one there so I called an ambulance

and was taken in to the hospital. I thought I was miscarrying,

I thought I was going to lose you.

It was some of the placenta separating. The doctors wanted to

monitor what was happening, so they kept me for observation

overnight. I couldn’t sleep because you were there but I

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worried you might not stay. It was the first time you stopped

being an idea and became someone that I had to have, had

to keep with me. Tigerlily; I felt you move. I held you, in me, I held

you and me in my arms and I said don’t go. Don’t Go. Please

stay, Tigerlily, please, stay. It was just me, but for the first time you

too. You and me and I wouldn’t let you leave me without you.

When I finally fell asleep I saw you walking. You were a tiny

person, with soft hair and big eyes. It was the longest path and

you had already started. I could see you were on the way, the

path wound away beyond anything I could see. You weren’t

on your own. There were these Seuss-like creatures walking

with you, with floppy ears and warm fur, bright eyes and gentle

footsteps. There was a llama and a sheep and a goat and a

rabbit and a few others. On you walked. You knew you had

forever to go but you weren’t alone and you weren’t scared. I

watched you while I dreamt, walking and walking. They followed

you with their warmth and you loved them. You chatted as you

walked, I couldn’t hear what you were saying. You would stop

and look at different things, you would urge the others to keep

going, they would carry you when you were tired, and on you

went. I knew I would wake up soon and I didn’t want to leave but

I knew you were safe. Besides, I could see how far there was to

go, you had only just started, you would get to me soon enough.

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I woke up and instead of going home, back to my cold empty

house, I decided to stay with your great-grandma. I promised

the doctors that I would be still and be slow and be patient. I

wanted your path to be as smooth as possible. So I stayed with

Jojo while The Captain was at sea. We would sit in her soft deep

chairs in front of the window that captured the ocean like a mural,

we would drink tea and eat prunes and go for gentle walks.

Telephone sat on the stairs watching her mum imagine a world

where her life was tenuous. Gaia was somewhere else; she was

years away.

Months later, living out of home - in a big rambling student house

in the middle of it all - Telephone sits at her desk thinking about

her mother. She thinks of this story. The afternoon light, greeny

gold, creeps through her broken blinds. Telephone normally

writes in the dark, deep in the night, but today she is awake

and soft and useful. Fighting the blinds she pulls at them until

they give her more light. Sitting down, she knows the story she

needs to tell but as the light fades she stops and starts because

the only thing more difficult than writing about your own pain is

writing about someone you love in pain. Especially when it is you

who caused it, and even more when you weren’t really you when

you did it.

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3. THE END (200) Disappointment clings to her neck like wet hair. You won’t give

her yelling and destruction, so she nurses this bile for the both

of you. The resentment is so delicious. So sickly, sticky, strong.

She wants you here, but you’re not. So don’t come here.

Her feet betray her, you say you like them; she hates them for

no longer being hers. You miss the salty, sweaty days when

you knew where you ended and she began. She walks around

in melancholic circles. She can’t hear you. In the silence she

thinks: the ineptitude of words. And longs for the things you

don’t know how to say.

What a benign broken heart, not real enough to hold it while it

bleeds; she folds it up and asks it not to make a mess. When

did she become the one holding on tighter, or was it always

her? She’s been thinking about what it would be like to be

finished. There is exhilaration in saying goodbye. But then you

would be gone. You would disappear and she would be left in

the mundane without you.

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4. WHERE YOU AND I (2. Tigerlily and 3. The End) 2. Tigerlily and 3. The End consider the strange ways that memory breathes with us while we keep moving in time. In “Mer-Mer: An Essay About How I Wish We Wrote Our Nonfictions” D’Agata writes that “etymologically speaking, at the core of every memoir is anxiety and wonder and doubt” (70). D’Agata adds that “according to its roots… memoir is an assaying of ideas, images and feelings” (70). Modjeska has drawn slightly different etymological links, writing in Timepieces that memoir is related to “the idea of mourning through memor, which carries meanings to do with mindfulness and remembering” (181). I have opened Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home with these sudden memoirs because they question the boundaries between two people in close relationships. 2. Tigerlily and 3. The End are nostalgic pieces that mourn a loss of connectedness. 2. Tigerlily and 3. The End explore the tension felt when someone in a close relationship with someone else is reminded of how differently they interpret their shared world. These pieces circle the feeling that the tangible divide between two people has melted into obscurity, alongside the sense that there is this space that aches with the impossibility of bridging the distance between the same two people. I wrote 2. Tigerlily early on in this project, before I knew what form it would take. I had already written a couple of short pieces when I realised I was interested in sudden memoir. I left all the other pieces behind but held on to 2. Tigerlily even

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though I could not see how it would fit in to my work. I did not think 2. Tigerlily could be read as a form of sudden memoir until I found Gornick’s The Situation and the Story. Gornick writes that “every work of literature has both a situation and a story” (13). She explains that “the situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer” (13). 2. Tigerlily is set in three different times: while my mum was pregnant, the day she told me about it, and the day that I wrote about it. I knew it was about my mum and what happened twenty-three years ago but until reading Gornick, I did not see that it was also about me rethinking my mum’s story as a grown up child living away from home for the first time. This abrupt change in my relationship with my mother brought this old story into the present as a work of sudden memoir. 2. Tigerlily explores the boundaries between mother and daughter during the mother’s pregnancy and once the daughter has moved out of home. It is the first time I have written in my mother’s voice and it does not sound like her at all. Discussing Bloom’s use of the Oedipal complex to talk about poets and their precursors, Gibbs writes that “Bloom’s poets misread the texts of their precursors precisely because they read them as precursors, in relation to themselves” (“Writing the Flesh of Others” 312). Perhaps Gibbs would also say that to grow up and become self-sufficient the memoirist needs to assume control of her parents voice and take possession of their stories.

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There are two characters that represent me in 2. Tigerlily. Telephone is the name I give myself in my work and Tigerlily is the name my mother gave me in the hospital when she thought she might miscarry. I decided to use both names in this piece because as much as the unborn baby in my mother’s womb and the walking Seuss-like child are me; they are also very much not me. Tigerlily is my mother’s projection onto her unborn child. I really like the tension between the two names, how in control I am of Telephone and how Tigerlily exists outside of me; she belongs to my mum. The way that Tigerlily both is and is not me sums up how I hope the people I have written about in Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home feel about the characters I have created to represent them. I hope that they understand that I have attempted to define them in order to make sense of my own world, not to dictate their worlds, which are something else entirely. I wrote 3. The End as a conclusion for Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home. It was meant to be about the inconceivability of knowing when something is over. It would have worked on two levels; it would have been an ending for Quick and Telephone’s relationship and it would have critiqued the notion of constructing a conclusion in memoir. Death and nostalgia are recurring themes in these stories, so it could have held together nicely. 3. The End ended up being more about the impossibility of extricating yourself from someone else once the lines between you have been blurred. Placing 3. The End at the beginning

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of the collection disrupts the chronological order of the stories and the narrative progression that could have otherwise been possible in this body of work. By placing 3. The End towards the beginning I am questioning the ways we line up events in our personal narrative. Disrupting the chronology of the pieces has helped me steer clear of trying to make too large a sense of these moments from my life. It has been a reminder that my objective is not to tell you all about myself, but to use some of my stories to give shape to what is occurring at a meta level of the narrative construction process. Writing intimately about people I am close to has forced me to think about what exactly it is that I am doing, why I feel driven to write about these particular moments and feelings. In “To Fashion a Text” Dillard says that “if you prize your memories as they are, by all means avoid – eschew – writing a memoir. Because it’s a certain way to lose them. You can’t put together a memoir without cannibalizing your life for parts” (156). To an extent that is what I feel that I have done here – cannibalised my life for parts. Then again, I have always collated events and moments from my life to tell a particular story. At least in Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home I am forced to consciously assess what it is that I am doing and the processes by which I am doing it.

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5. INTRODUCTION TO NOT KNOWING (1900)

You stay at her house sometimes, too drunk to get home and

you try not to touch her. It would be wrong if you did.

You never noticed it before, if you were touching her or not.

Teenage weekends you’d share a bed at whoever’s house,

your bottoms would touch in the middle, you’d laugh through

the awkward. You pushed each other around. At school

excursions you’d throw her over your shoulder. You would race

her down the stairs, shoving her into the banister; she’d have

killed you if you had let her win. All those years, touching her

all that time, never thinking that one day you’d have to not.

There is that photo of the two of you, the night it started, the

night you became two people that get talked about as a pair.

You’re standing close, both of you with your ET cheeks and

shiny teeth. She’s laughing. You are holding her gaze but she

looks down, pretending to be coy, just as the photo is taken.

You’re looking at her like you’ve won. You could eat the happy

like pavlova; a throatful of cloud. You were thirteen and she

played up her drunkenness so she would be brave enough to

kiss you. When you rang her afterwards you were too unsure

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to tell her to stop being so up herself, that you didn’t worship her

like she imagined. You let her make an excuse and hang up.

You were angry. You couldn’t talk to her and she stayed away.

You didn’t talk for a year and then you were uncomfortable

together for a few more. Then your families went away

together when you turned seventeen and you remembered

how much you liked each other, more than most others.

School finished. People made jokes, how you would get

married one day. You would stay at her house when you were

too messed up after a night out for your girlfriend to see you.

You’d wear her flannel pyjamas and stay up talking and

laughing. Or she’d decide she wanted to go out in the middle

of the night and you would drive her and whichever friend she

had been drinking with on the kitchen floor to a cringy

nightclub at two in the morning. Laughing and fighting, you

were safe in each other’s company.

Then you’re 19 and it is the night her little sister nearly died.

She was meant to be looking after her sister but it was

someone’s birthday so she went out and left her sister

watching Sex and the City. She left the keys in case her sister

wanted to cross the road for ice cream. When she got home

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her sister wasn’t answering her phone or opening the door.

She nearly went back to her friend’s house but then she heard

vomiting coming from inside. Her sister wouldn’t respond so

she called her parents but the call rang out so her friend called

triple zero and then the police came and did nothing so they

called the fire brigade who knocked down the door and got to

her sister and said ‘she’s not breathing!’ and put oxygen in her

mouth. Eventually her sister woke up and the paramedics

came but they didn’t know anything about anything except that

they liked her flatmate’s computer. The paramedics left too

and all of a sudden it was just her and her sister and her friend

and they were so scared and so tired.

They were going to bed but she got a message from you that

made no sense. Something worried her so she wrote back and

you called and she couldn’t understand what you were saying

but she heard the panic. You hung up and messaged her an

address so she left her friend and her sister and got in the lift

and took off her shoes to hold the front doors open because

she still didn’t know where the keys were. She walked

barefoot, looking for you at four in the morning. These men

started following her calling her Little Red Riding Hood

because her dress was red and blowy and she thought, once I

get to him. She kept walking and she cut her foot and she

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realised she had left her phone in the apartment and how

would she find you but then she saw you.

She couldn’t see your face in the dark. You didn’t talk much

but she heard the catch in your throat. You didn’t ask why she

wasn’t wearing shoes. You followed her home. In the lift she

looked ahead, in the hallway she walked ahead, you walked

close behind. Finally inside she turned around and looked at

you, your face swollen and raw. And she’s furious, she’s so

angry, ‘what did you do, what the fuck did you do you idiot, you

fucking idiot’ and she’s crying and you grab her and hold her

as tight as you can. When her blood stops racing she takes a

step back and she asks ‘what happened?’ and you tell her

about the urinal, how you were a smartarse and out of

nowhere it’s not funny because you’re on the floor and they’re

hurting you like you are someone else, someone who gets

hurt. You try to tell her how no one else wrote back to your

message, or how they thought it was a joke. ‘No one,’ you tell

her, ‘just you.’

Her friend and her sister are in the next room. You sit on the

green couch her father had craned into the apartment and it’s

just the two of you in this living room, in this night, in this story

that isn’t supposed to be yours. She wrenches onto your

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fingers with her fingers and just quickly, just quietly, you cry,

you both cry because the world just got darker.

She stands up and walks away. In the bathroom tears fall as

water runs and her clothes come off. Her friend comes out of

her room and sits on the bathroom floor. Eventually, when you

can, you get up and sit outside the bathroom door because

she would be angry in the morning if you saw her naked and

crying in the same night.

Then she runs away to Hong Kong. Then you run away to

Amsterdam. You break up with your girlfriend and tattoo your

independence on your arm. She comes back and then you

come back. You’re twenty now, the year is ending, you start

saying things to her; you tell her she doesn’t need make up, you

mock her more than before, she starts giggling and rolling her

eyes. You all still go out and get drunk and come home as the

sun is coming up and you still share a bed, but it’s changing.

On New Years Eve you’re at different music festivals. There isn’t

much reception and your phone is about to die but you send her

a message. You say, I’m having fun but I wish you were here.

In January the two of you sit on the bathroom floor of a friend’s

house talking nonsense that feels important, you do lines off

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the toilet and roll cigarettes without filters in this friend’s living

room. You’re young, and rude and decadent. You pass out

behind a curtain and she finds you and puts you to bed and

brings you water and you grab her wrist when she’s leaving,

pulling her back, and you kiss her and it makes you sick and

scared and apprehensive and excited and it is dark in the

room and it’s all happening so fast and your clothes are thrown

around this strange bedroom and neither of you are thinking

but then the door opens, someone is looking for her, and it all

stops. It is too much. It is too much for both of you. You’re not

sure if things start up again for a bit or not but soon enough

you’re both asleep in private shock because you’re not the

same. When the sun comes up. When you leave this room. It’s

going to be different.

It could have been the beginning but neither of you let it be.

The year that followed was messy and the outlines are blurred

in both of your memories. A year of not knowing what you were

doing, sure it would be fine but worried you could be ruining it

all. You take turns coming up with reasons not to sleep

together. You fight. You’re mean to each other. You’d plan to

stay away but a few days would pass and you’d be back at

each other’s houses. Neither of you wanted to talk about it.

You tried, once. But you weren’t brave, or sure. You demanded

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she tell you what she felt but she wouldn’t. She asked you to

leave it and you said ok. She had decided the morning she

woke up next to you, with everything changed, as she

struggled with her beaded bracelet and you took her wrist and

tied it for her, that she would ask nothing of you so that she

would be able to walk away when it was time.

At her twenty-first, you make a speech. She had asked you if

you would late one night, drinking cheap red wine and trying to

teach you how to crump. You said yes but she didn’t bring it up

the next day. She didn’t think you would do it. It took her by

surprise when you got up in front of her family and her friends

and said all those things. You said that she worries something

will happen and you’ll lose each other but that you won’t let

that happen. Swimming in tequila, you follow her into the girls’

toilets. You have run out of excuses.

The next night you sleep with your old girlfriend, the one from

before Amsterdam. Most of your friends are in common so she

knew before lunch. She drove someone somewhere and then

couldn’t go home. She drove to the beach. In the shock of

early summer she tells herself the wet in her eyes is from the

glare. Her knuckles pale, wrapped around the steering wheel.

She says, Enough. Enough.

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You look at her now, with someone else, someone better than

you, and you feel relief. Relief that you still have your friend.

Some of it is still the same, you tell her things and she still

seems to know before you’ve said it. Sometimes you think

maybe one day. You were right not to choose her, you would

have lost her; you feel relief. Until you remember that she never

chose you either. And you wonder what exactly you chose.

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6. TAXI AND I KILLED A DOG (1800)

We’re listening to “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” by The

Wombats. Taxi and I are on our way to Elevator’s. We are

singing along and Taxi is speeding up because we’ve just

turned left onto the Nepean Highway. There is a golden

retriever bounding towards us; long light haired and lovely.

We’re singing and speeding up. I point and I tell Taxi to watch

out, or maybe I yell. Taxi looks and breaks in slow motion.

Too slow. We’re stopped. Put your hazard lights on. She’s

shaking. Is it alive? Telephone, is it alive? I don’t want to

look, but I do. It’s in the left lane. Not moving. It is moving.

It’s getting up. It’s barking. It’s getting up and it’s hurt. You

have to move the car. Move the car so it’s behind the dog,

then no one else will hit it. Taxi. Move the car. She isn’t

moving. She isn’t doing anything. I can’t, she says. Her

hands are shaking, she isn’t listening. Taxi, you have to do

this. I’ll call the ambulance. You have to move. But she

doesn’t and somewhere behind us the lights go green. It’s

too late now. I go to get out of the car but Taxi doesn’t let me,

we’re on a highway. The first few cars go around the dog but

then a station wagon hits it. It drives straight over it. The dog

is still there. Another car hits it. It’s a small car and it’s

25


stopped. It’s stopped on top of the dog. It’s a small car with L

plates and it’s on top of the dog.

Taxi and I get out of the car. By now lots of cars have stopped.

People come running over from the other side of the highway,

they are crying, it’s their dog. A girl our age gets under the car

with the dog, she’s holding onto it and it’s howling, no, she’s

howling, the dog is dead. Someone calls the police. We stand

around on the grassy traffic island watching the family cry.

There is a dog-sized dent in the front of Taxi’s car. There is a

hunk of golden retriever hair caught in the crushed metal. The

police tell Taxi that she needs to take the family’s details

because they’re supposed to pay for the damage.

Taxi and I get back in the car. “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” by

The Wombats starts with the engine, right where it left off. It

jumps down our throats. Taxi turns off the music. We drive

around the corner to Elevator’s house for dinner.

____

The first time I saw a dead body was on a grade six winter

afternoon. It was the day before the Funeral. It was near a

bottle shop we went to once. There was a big road and then

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grass and then flowers and then the Funeral place. They had

Gwen in a little room next to where they do the Funerals. It

was empty except for Gwen who was in a coffin. It might have

been a church; it looked like somewhere people might get

married. Gwen’s coffin was as high as my ribs, Baby couldn’t

see in very well, she was really short.

Gwen looked pretty. Someone did her make up; her lips were

shiny. Lily told us those were her mum’s favourite jeans. I

thought dead people would look sad or angry but she didn’t.

She didn’t look like she was sleeping either. It wasn’t scary but

I realised I don’t believe in heaven.

I touched her skin. It was cold, not icy; room temperature. It

felt thicker than before. Everyone cried. I tried not to be loud, I

always make lots of noise when I cry. I’m not sure where the

crying came from. I didn’t know who or what I was crying for

but my feelings were swelling and it felt good to gasp.

When the crying finished I wondered how long we were going

to stay. It would be rude to get bored of looking at a dead

person. I looked around at everyone else. Mum looked funny,

it’s her Best Friend. I try to picture my Best Friend in there but

I don’t have one anymore. Magda is living in Moscow now and

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Ed is back in Mexico. I’m not going to see them for years, even

though we send each other emails sometimes. Maybe it’ll be

Elevator. Imagine if she knew I was imagining her as my Best

Friend in a coffin. I look at Lily. She is looking at her mum in a

coffin. I picture my mum in there. It’s easy to do since Mum is

right next to me. She looks a bit like Gwen. If it were Mum in

there Dad would be here. I don’t think many people get to die

looking so nice. Right before we leave I give her a kiss on the

forehead. I had to wait for it to be my turn and I was a bit

nervous but it went well.

At the Funeral Baby and I sit with Gran and Pa. Mum sits up

the front with The Family. There are songs. Gran and Pa sing

really loud. They love religious songs. As soon as the music

starts I can’t breathe properly and strangled wet sounds come

out of me. There are some poems and serious speeches.

Then Mum makes a speech. You call it a eulogy. She tells

everyone how when they were little, Gwen would come and

stay at Forest Hill and they would try and teach the chickens

how to talk. Gwen and Mum were going to be famous. They

were going to be on television with the chickens. When they

were older - older than me even - they stole Gwen’s dad’s

razor when they were on his boat and tried to shave their legs.

The razor was rusty and old and they used salt water. Mum

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laughed and cried about blood and salt sticking to their legs in

the Tassie sun.

Now we’re back in Australia Mum and Dad promised that they

won’t make us move again so I’ll probably have a friend like

that soon. That friend might die but we might shave our legs.

I’m not sure how. Dad must have a razor somewhere.

____

I don’t have my glasses so my vision is vague. The heat

doesn’t help; soft pulsating edges blur what is going on. All

these dark clothes don’t make sense in the dense summer.

The sweat tickles, running down my legs, gathering at the

small of my back, fattening my hands. It itches. It’s hard to tell

if the tickle is sweat sliding down my skin or a fly sucking on

the wet. The words from the front fall towards me like days

from next week. My ears are blocked.

I stand towards the back, hesitant because I didn’t know her

that well. Also, we were late. I listen to a story about two sick

girls, one with cystic fibrosis, the other with anorexia. A

friendship cemented in hospitals; one dead, one living.

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The cemetery grass is faded greeny brown. I hold Elevator’s

hand and we listen to songs that will never be the same for all

of these people. Now the songs will mean this day. The girl’s

dad cries as he says that she wasn’t scared, she’d had her

whole life to learn how to be brave, but that she worried how

her family would be without her. The stories go on and on, so

long in the remorseless sun.

A death party for the young and the shocked. Dressed in the

dark colours our grandparents have learnt to wear, we stand

together, a sweaty wall marking this outraged goodbye. I am

here for Elevator, my friend who chose this friend. When she

met this girl I said you have to decide, are you going to love

her until she dies, or are you going to step back so it doesn’t

hurt as much?

____

Elevator couldn’t come to Taxi’s grandpa’s funeral because

she is on a weekend away with her boyfriend. I walk in to the

church on my own and spot the mothers of some girls I went

to school with. I sit behind them and whisper hello. Taxi is up

the front with all the family, looking beautiful and poised; she’s

Betty Draper from Mad Men. I see her looking around; I wave.

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The mothers tell me to go and sit with her; they say she needs

me. Taxi’s looking around again, she waves me over.

I feel uncomfortable about sitting with the family at the funeral

of a man I never met but I do it anyway. Demurely walking

down the aisle, I make my way over to my friend. I forgot to tell

you to wear black, she says, I worried you would decide not to.

Taxi doesn’t cry. It’s the quietest funeral I’ve been to. Taxi’s

father reads from a shaking piece of paper, telling us about

the cheeky scoundrel of a man we’re there to burry. His sharp

restrained sobs puncture the quiet.

At the wake Taxi says she wishes everyone would stop being

sad, her grandpa wanted to die. She bellows that we’re here

to put the fun into funeral and orders us espresso martinis.

Old relatives and family friends try to be subtle when they

ask us if we’re a couple. Not like that, we say, and order

more espresso martinis.

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7. THE PAST UNDER CONSTRUCTION (5. An Introduction to Not Knowing and 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog) I have taken isolated and emotionally charged “moments of being” and linked them thematically in 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing and 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog. In these pieces the past has been manipulated in to telling very particular stories. 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing reads as a history of Telephone and Pigeon’s relationship, while 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog recounts Telephone’s experiences at funerals. In How Should a Person Be? Heti asks what it is that makes us tell “stories that [have] such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why [do] we pick certain dots and connect them and not others?” (279.) I have wondered how I chose the scenes that make up these two pieces, particularly 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing where there were hundreds of moments to choose from. When I showed 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing to Pigeon, the boy it is about, I thought he would be angry or that he would tell me that I had told the wrong story. I thought he would tell me that those people were not us. Like Elliott in his memoir The Adderall Diaries I have been wondering how much “I [have] mythologised my own history, arranged my experiences... How far I [have] strayed from the truth?” (66.) I expected Pigeon to fight me for our story. I thought that he would tell me that I was deluding myself. In “Occasional Desire” Lazar makes the point that with memoir “the world in all likelihood does not register that only half a story has been told” (108) and that concerned me. Rather than feeling

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relieved when Pigeon told me I had got the story right, I felt worse. He was there; he should have known just how much I had left out. With 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing I picked a couple of moments from the hundreds at my disposal and connected them as if they were linked, as if one moment informed the other, while discarding everything that came in between. The way that I arranged Telephone and Pigeon’s history made me uncomfortable but I was not sure why until Pigeon approved of the way that I told our story. I realised that I had created a simplified version of events that was already replacing the real. Once our story was confined to words on pages it became difficult to un-see the progression that 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing narrates. In order to tell a story, Gornick tells me that I “must first figure out what the experience is; then pull from [my] ordinary, everyday self the coherent narrator […] best able to tell the story” (“Truth in Personal Narrative” 9). When I first tried to write this piece I found that I was not capable of telling it in first person and that third person was too removed. In second person I found a narrator who was able to say what I needed to have said. This narrator addresses Pigeon, discussing his and Telephone’s history. At first the narrator seems omniscient, but as the piece progresses the sense that the narrator is untrustworthy and allegiant to Telephone grows. Gornick believes that the way the narrator ‘sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen” (“Truth in Personal Narrative” 7).

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The narrator of 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing makes a few slips that indicate a privileged understanding of how Telephone felt, such as by saying: “when her blood stops racing” (22) and “she didn’t think you would do it. It took her by surprise” (25). I found it necessary to hint at the unreliability of the narrator because I saw 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing taking control of the past and asserting itself as the accepted version of Pigeon and Telephone’s history. Like 2. Tigerlily, 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing is about a change in situation. Not being available to Pigeon anymore and being at a safe distance from inside another relationship, I was able to look back over the years at the two of us. 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing is made up of a series of chaotic, jolting memories that collided on a night that I spent rethinking my relationship with Pigeon. Writing 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing was the first time I felt far enough away from him to be able to wrestle some of it onto the page. The “sudden” in this story is found in the very new feeling that we might be finished; that these two thousand words might be it for us. After writing 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing I was interested in experimenting more explicitly with constructing a story out of moments that I had not previously considered side-by-side. I already had the scene from Gwen’s funeral. It was a lot longer and it was going to stand alone. I also had the scene where Taxi and I hit the dog. I thought about the other funerals I had been to and remembered holding hands with Elevator in a cemetery. I realised that all the death stories I had written

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talked about friendship. I put the three scenes together and then went to Taxi’s grandpa’s funeral. 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog became a celebration of friendship against a backdrop of loss and change and growing up. It takes moments that had subconsciously made an impression on me at the time and links them. What I have ended up with in 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog is an response to my twelve-year-old self’s longing for a Best Friend. While the narrator of 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing tells the story from a fixed point in time, 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog is told in the first person, present tense. It spans the same ten years as 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing, but in 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog the narrator moves with the piece. Discussing McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Larson describes Frankie’s childlike voice as “a triumph of artifice” (53). In the paragraphs at Gwen’s funeral I attempt something similar to McCourt. In order to be able to invite the reader into the mind of twelve-year-old Telephone and assume her voice, I deliberately suppress my adult voice and my adult understanding. Thinking about what I am doing in line with Strawson’s theory of discontinuous identity I believe that I have come very close to writing fiction in this vignette. The version of myself that I am attempting to inhabit is from so long ago, with so many different versions between us that I feel that what I have done with the scene at Gwen’s funeral is disingenuous. In 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing and 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog the past is treated as malleable. To write these pieces I

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had to delve into the unruly catalogue of my experience and search for scenes to reinterpret. I have used these scenes to construct a personal narrative that I had previously not considered. These new narratives are now very much a part of my history.

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8. FORTY DEGREE SUMMER (600)

It is as if that night exists in a void. That it happened, and then

we woke up, kept moving; left it behind. Instead of getting

closer to absorbing it into our mythology, what happened

hovers outside, refusing to be made sense of; just another part

of the mayhem of leaving school and turning eighteen. The

shock of it was everywhere but then again it seemed to

evaporate with the heat.

I was away the summer we finished high school. I was in Paris

with my family crying in the bath about my ex-boyfriend. My

friends grew up without me in those forty-degree days. What

happened that night, while I was on the other side of the

world, isn’t my story to tell, but what came after; that belongs

to all of us.

It was our introduction to living in the world without parents

and teachers. The shock and the anger and the hurt swept

over us without our noticing. We had everything. The shine on

us would have made you sick. But then the thing happened,

and we splintered into the bits of ugliness we didn’t know was

a part of us.

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Elevator says that when I talk about our first year out of

school I talk about us like we were all unhappy. She says she

knows what I mean but that we were having so much fun.

She remembers the excitement, all the possibilities in this big

new world.

I remember her angry and proud, desperate to get away from

us but furious when she felt left behind. She made new friends

and ditched us for them but cried when she lost sight of

Twiggy and Market. I remember Twiggy quiet and distracted.

She worked and she slept and she saw her boyfriend. It was

months before she said depression. Taxi was angry with

everyone, poisonous with blame. As soon as she could, she

disappeared to American summer camp where bedtimes and

camp songs reminded her how the world was supposed to be.

Market took things into her own hands and walked away. She

left her psychologist, she left her boyfriend and she stopped

coming to uni. And me, I was dreaming about my high school

boyfriend forgiving me and spending all my time with a boy

whose heart I didn’t think I could break.

What happened on the grassless dry dirt amongst the crushed

cans that decorated the New Year isn’t my story but it should

have been. It is a stupid thing to say, but if I had been there it

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would have been different. It wouldn’t have happened. Or if it

had, I would have gone with her, to the police, to hospital:

home. But I wasn’t there. Elevator and Twiggy weren’t there.

Taxi was there but she got it wrong, and if it had been any

other night, it wouldn’t have mattered.

The years have worn on and the fear is mostly gone. But

there’s a black hole where that night was. There was us before

that night. There is us after that night. And the pieces don’t fit

together. The blackness ate something and the haze and the

hurt make it impossible to see what exactly it took.

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9. PASSING IT ALONG (900) Baby knocks on Telephone’s door, mascara tears stain her

swollen cheeks. Can I come in?

Baby climbs up onto her big sister’s bed. Baby is in year 12,

Telephone remembers what that was like. Exhausted, excited,

unsure; it felt like every weekend she was waking up in a

different party dress to fragments of memories; tears and

disappointment broken up with moments of hilarity and the

feeling it was all worth it.

Baby never gives herself away. As much as Telephone and

Taxi try to pry these things out of her, Baby keeps secrets

better than Gringotts. Telephone has been hurled wasted

teenage abuse after picking her sister up from parties, she has

hoisted her sister out of her vomit in the front garden, but she

has never seen Baby like this.

Baby was wearing a new dress, she bought it today. Telephone

helped her with her makeup. It had felt like one of those nights

where something different might happen. Baby is chatty and

animated between sobs, dramatising the tragedy of being

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eighteen and laughing about the all round shittyness of boys.

When she is ready she stops and something shifts in the room.

At boarding school none of the girls ate. They wouldn’t eat

from Wednesday until Sunday. Before Telephone can think of

anything to say, Baby keeps going. Me too. I didn’t eat either.

They sucked at making gluten free food anyway. The first

weekend I tried it I went to The Lorikeet’s house. She went on

and on about how healthy I looked. She said I looked great.

You just have to keep doing what you’re doing. She’s our

grandma, I trusted her. I did what she said. I kept doing what

I was doing.

Telephone’s throat is on fire form holding back her anger. She

wants to ring The Lorikeet and tell her what she has done. But

she doesn’t. There would be no point, The Lorikeet would

have meant well; by telling her she’d only be passing on the

hurt. But their mother needed to know. She was always

suggesting Baby eat healthier food and offering to make her

salads for school lunch and strange concoctions of seeds and

nuts for breakfast. Maybe she’d figure out a way to get over

her own eating neurosis if she knew how close it had come to

working its way back into the family.

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Of all the mums, theirs is the most beautiful. She does yoga and

goes for walks with the dogs and eats a stupid amount of

vegetables. She gets too skinny. She has told Telephone that

sometimes she catches her reflection and there is a chubby girl

looking back at her. Baby finds it hard to lose weight because of

her coeliac. Their mum only wants to help but how often can she

say the worst possible thing without it being her fault?

Baby cries on her sister’s bed. Telephone climbs up next to her,

fitting around her like a shell. Or armor. Don’t listen to them. They

are the worst. Mum is the worst. If you want to be healthier I’ll get

up and go for walks with you before school. We can eat better

food together. But you can’t ever do that again. Ever. That shit is

wack, homie. You’re not like Mum. Telephone holds out her pinky

finger. Baby clings to it with her own.

They talk about silly things, what Taxi has been up to and Dad’s

latest tirade against littering in Bayside. Baby goes to bed; the

alcohol and the spilling of secrets send her straight to sleep. She

will feel better in the morning.

Telephone can’t sleep because she is furious. In the quiet of her

night time house she decides that there is nothing worse than

women who ask the girls they love not to be so hungry.

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10. SPEAKING FOR YOU (Forty Degree Summer and Passing it Along) Truth is not its own justification. Just because something happened does not mean that I have the right to write about it. Rose discusses this in “Whose Truth?” saying that it “is extraordinary how people think truth is its own justification” (35). Rose goes on to quote Malcolm, who writes that the “biographer is a thief” (36). Rose then extends this accusation to the memoirist, saying that “you cannot write about someone else, however briefly, however sympathetically, without stealing a little bit of their self-determination” (36). Because I believe that interrogating ethics and the ownership of stories is an important part of thinking about the way that we write personal narrative, I have decided to include 8. Forty Degree Summer and 9. Passing It Along in this collection, even though these were not my stories to choose to tell. In Memoir: A History Yagoda brings up what he calls the “periodic complaints about the exhibitionism, unseemliness, and just plain wrongness” (66) of memoir as a genre. Lazar goes as far as to call memoir “a bit whorish” (104) in “Occasional Desire”. I do not disagree. There is something questionable about the way memoirists pillage their own lives and the lives of those around them for material. Not that they necessarily mean to take from others, it is just that the boundaries are not clear. As Garner has asked, and as I have wondered in multiple ways and on various levels over the course of this year in writing this collection

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of sudden memoirs, “where do I end and other people begin?” (“I” 152). 8. Forty Degree Summer and 9. Passing It Along actively deal with the problem of telling other people’s stories. Rather than deciding to leave them out for the sake of the people they are about, I made the decision to keep them. In “Persona” Shields talks about “the deep ambivalence writers have about using their personal lives to make a living” (86). 8. Forty Degree Summer and 9. Passing it Along are about people I love being hurt and the silence around what has happened to them. By speaking for them, as I have here, I do not know if I am helping or hurting them further. According to Malcolm I am a thief but I am also ambivalent. I do not know if I had the right to put these pieces into words and I do not know if I have the right to share them now that I have. I am uncomfortable with the way 8. Forty Degree Summer asks the reader to be interested in something that I know I should not be talking about. I was not there for the event at the centre of this work, the event that this story decidedly avoids discussing, and my friends and I all disagree on the consequences of that night. In The Feminist Memoir Project Blau Du Plessis and Snitow write that “there will always be unbridgeable space between the story of the one and the story of the many; highlighting one memory often casts another in shadow” (23). Ortiz Cofer would appear to agree, she believes that “in retrospect, we are never in quite the same place as others; even when we are physically

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together, our minds are processing the same information through our own very private filters” (“¿La Verdad?” 29). Elevator has blatantly said that she does not agree with the way I have described how we were feeling in 8. Forty Degree Summer. Even though I have said that she disagrees with me, mine is the dominant voice; her voice is muted by its inclusion and subsequent dismissal in this piece. By writing 8. Forty Degree Summer I have diminished Elevator’s ability to be heard when she asserts that she does not agree with how I have represented the consequences of that night. 8. Forty Degree Summer is about the way we grapple with the past in order to make meaning in the present. It is about absence and loss. It is my attempt to convey the lack of meaningful narrative around what happened that summer. It is about the tension between not wanting to talk about what happened and the feeling of there being a black hole jamming our understanding of how that night has affected us. My Supervisor and I speak a lot about weaving and connecting. When she read 8. Forty Degree Summer she drew a stitching technique on the bottom of her printout to illustrate how she thought it should be read. She suggested that 8. Forty Degree Summer be placed towards the start of Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home because the ideas it introduces about the evasive nature of memory run through the whole body of work.

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In “I” Garner says that “it’s impossible to write intimately about your own life without revealing something of the people who are close to you” (152). I have gone one step further: these are not pieces about me that include other people; these are pieces about other people. Especially 9. Passing It Along. My sister knows about 9. Passing it Along but she has not read it. I doubt that she would ask me not to use it but I also doubt that she would like it. I hide behind my little sister in this piece. I also hide behind her in one of the last pieces, 23. Going Home. Our parents used to mock me for hiding behind her in situations that made me uncomfortable. While I like it that this part of our relationship made it into my work, it becomes problematic when I hide behind her stories and use them to talk about things I want to discuss. In The Adderall Diaries Elliott quotes a friend saying “you just view people and situations according to how they might or might not best serve your current interest” (47); this is what I have been doing all year by writing these pieces. Garner believes that “if I am rough on myself it frees me to be rough on others as well” (“I” 152) but I do not agree. I am a willing participant. I decide on the rules and make the word choices. No matter how much I expose myself I do not believe that it gives me license to expose others. In giving voice to 8. Forty Degree Summer and 9. Passing It Along, I have spoken for other people in my attempt to dismantle the silence around harm and female bodies. I have said that these things happened and they did not

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happen in a vacuum. I recognise that by speaking for others I have replaced the silence with my stories. Baby and Market are no less silent because I have written 8. Forty Degree Summer and 9. Passing it Along.

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11. IN THE QUIET (400)

The silence is killing her ability to think. He is in the bathroom

brushing his teeth with the door closed, cleaning himself of

her, spitting her into the sink. She stares ahead waiting for

what will happen when the door stops being closed.

The room that engulfs her has become familiar. The walls are

dressed in art and design, cut outs, the things he finds

beautiful: the piles of records under the turntables, the Turkish

carpet under her feet, the chandelier he’s renovated into a

crow’s nest. These things that are his observe her as she sits

on his nicely made bed and waits.

The incense, burned hours before, gets in her throat. The

heavy in her ears and the quiet in the house, in the street, in

the suburb, begin to suffocate her. The empty space and the

restraint unsettle her.

Cool air rushes at her toes as the bathroom door opens. She

looks up to catch his eye as he crosses the room. He avoids it.

Sitting beside her, facing away, he undresses for bed.

Contained and quiet, she doesn’t know how to reach him. She

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moves behind him, cold hands on hot skin, her forehead at the

top of his back. He doesn’t move, resisting her down to his

nerves. She falls back, the space between them pulling and

flatlining, magnetic and void. He finds pyjamas and puts them

on with his back to her. She crawls off his bed, standing and

undressing in the corner of his eye.

In the soundless she thinks, I don’t know him, we don’t get

along, he doesn’t know me, he can’t stand me, he should be

with someone light, he should be with someone warm, what

are we doing together, this was reckless.

She turns off the light and climbs over him into his bed.

Together they lie in his coffin for two. Deathly still, brittle hands

folded over dry hearts. Two microcosms on fire side-by-side,

too unsure to reach for the other.

The unknown flirts with her imagination. She moves towards

him, just a little. He moves away.

The quiet sears but to make a sound would be to anesthetise.

For the first time words threaten, empty and false. From her

wrist time shouts it’s passing. Silence, like blood drowning, the

distance between them wearing on.

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I’ll say it. I’ll just say it. But she doesn’t. This night has taken

her voice.

I’ll do it. I can do it.

But nothing.

She waits because she won’t sleep. She won’t sleep until this

is done. So she waits. But time won’t, it bellows from her wrist.

And the silence grows deeper.

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12. THE PSYCHIATRIC SUPERHERO (700)

Mum and Baby and I were in Tassie, at The Lorikeet’s house. I

think Dad was there too but he’s not really a part of this story.

Maybe he’d gone to bed or maybe he was over at his mum’s

house. It must have been Christmas.

There was a big flowerpot in the garden. Mum and The

Lorikeet were out. Baby and I were probably in the pool or

fighting over the exercise trampoline. Actually Dad must have

been there, we wouldn’t have been alone.

Something was strange about Mum and The Lorikeet when

they came home. It was already getting dark. The Lorikeet

said, We are planting Alfredo’s ashes, do you want to help?

Baby and I came outside, solemn in our pink pyjamas. I would

have been eight or nine. Baby must have been five or six; she

would have been no help at all. We fought over the dirt and the

tools. I can’t remember if it was a tree or a flower we planted, I

think it was a tree.

Alfredo had been dead for at least ten years. I didn’t

understand why we were burying him. I would have asked but

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the answer must have been boring because I can’t remember

what they said. I think it was something about how he needed

to be in a bigger pot so the tree could keep growing.

______

Last year Mum and I were at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival

listening to the editor of Island Magazine talking about the

future of the literature journal. She was telling the audience

about a story on the New Norfolk Insane Asylum that was in

her latest issue. The asylum closed down a while ago but

people still say it is the most haunted place in Australia. Mum

leant over and whispered, That’s where your uncle was.

Mum’s brother, The Psychiatric Superhero, spent ten years in

and out of mental hospitals. Mum talks about it sometimes, not

often. She talks about being seventeen and visiting; the

waiting rooms and the other patients. She talks about what it

was like without her big brother. He wasn’t there for the whole

ten years. He would leave, start art courses, travel around

Australia. But he kept going back.

Their world crept on while he lived in the locked ward. Mum

moved to Launceston and became a teacher. Their little sister

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finished high school and moved to Sydney. The Lorikeet threw

herself into cultivating year after year of strong speaking, free

moving drama students with sharp diction. I’m not sure what

Alfredo did, the stories I hear about him have such a faded

etherial quality, I don’t know how to line them up and make them

tell me things.

The Lorikeet’s dusty mausoleum coughs up secrets from deep

corners. Her house is heavy with shadows and memories. There

are rooms full of jaundiced books and wardrobes crowded with

the treasured outfits of the long dead. The Psychiatric

Superhero’s paintings demand space and attention wherever

there is room on the walls. The weight of nostalgia is exhausting.

The Lorikeet’s longing for the boy he was over ripens her stories

and reduces the choices he has made and the life that he has

lived to a cautionary tale. She likes to say that her son was too

beautiful, too fragile for New Norfolk High. She blames the

voices on the drugs; the marijuana and the LSD. Mum says

that’s not fair. Mum thinks he was hiding behind them, that he

was self medicating. It might have been genetic but you can’t

say that to The Lorikeet. You have to blame the drugs.

After the Writers Festival Mum and I linked arms and walked

across Federation Square in the springtime sun. Mum told me

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that when her father died The Psychiatric Superhero stole his

ashes and threw them around the courtyard of the locked

ward, turning his prison into a graveyard. The New Norfolk

Insane Asylum closed down thirteen years later. That is where

Mum had been with The Lorikeet that afternoon all those years

ago, digging up the courtyard in the locked ward at the New

Norfolk Insane Asylum, hoping at least some of what they

were getting was a father, a husband.

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13. REARRANGING MEMORY (11. In the Quiet and 12. The Psychiatric Superhero) 11. In the Quiet and 12. The Psychiatric Superhero are about the past being altered and rewritten in the present. Here I am interested in how our memories and our understanding of our memories change as we make connections between events and stories and people. Like Doty in “Bride in Beige” I am “allegiant to memory, not to history” (12). What I wrote about in 11. In the Quiet was strange and unlike anything that had happened between Quick and I before. The silence between us came on all of a sudden and stayed longer than I knew what to do with. Half a year later the silence between us, or his silence and my inability to break through or understand it, is defining and destroying our relationship. Rereading 11. In the Quiet months later, it is as if we never got past that night, and perhaps we have not. Shields writes that if you want to get personal in your writing you “must first choose what to conceal” (“Persona” 84). After writing 11. In the Quiet I asked a few people to read it. They all wanted to know what had caused the silence between Quick and Telephone. I did not want to share what had happened before the scene opened; I was only interested in talking about the silence and how it felt. Looking back, what had happened seems trivial, but the silence and the way I wrote about it in this piece feels impossibly intimate, but that is because of what came after; what that silence and those that have followed have come to mean for us.

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In Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home I have avoided the first person when it comes to writing about Quick and about Pigeon. In “Tender Fictions” Hammer discusses the “compelling weight of implied ‘truth’” (149) attributed to the first person. This “implied truth” made me uncomfortable, especially when dealing with Quick and Pigeon. I found that the distance between the third person narrator and Telephone allowed me to be less critical of the ways I managed to write about my life than when I wrote in first person. Although 11. In the Quiet was one of the first pieces I wrote for this collection and 3. The End was the last, I have positioned 3. The End at the very beginning and left 11. In the Quiet until a lot later. By disrupting chronology in this way I have inadvertently changed the way I understand and remember the night that at the time seemed to be an isolated and bizarre aberration. Ortiz Cofer believes that “we are constantly changing our personal narrative so that it matches our idea of who we are and in what role we see ourselves” (29). Writing and collating these sudden memoirs for this project, in the middle of the breakdown of my relationship with Quick, meant that with every change in our relationship I reinterpreted what I had written. In “The Past in Autobiography” Mandel writes that “since the past only truly exists in the present and since the present is always in motion, the past itself changes too… while the illusion created is that it stays fixed.” (77) What was for a long time an isolated moment between Quick and Telephone has since become the first in a long series of failures in communication; essentially the past has been changed.

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12. The Psychiatric Superhero is all about the past; a past I was not a part of and another past I did not understand even as I partook in it. Dillard captures some of the sentiments I am playing with here when she talks about “waking up and noticing that you’ve been put down in a world that’s already under way” in “To Fashion a Text” (146). There is so much I do not know about the lives of my parents, their siblings, their parents. I am a part of an extended narrative, and until recently I had not realised that I had not read the chapters before my character’s entrance. But I am filling in some gaps. I’m learning that there are gaps. I could get a lot of answers and explanations just by ringing up my mum or my uncle or my grandma, but that is not what I am trying to do here. In this piece I am interested in the flawed understanding we have of the stories we are born into. The fights between my uncle and his father, the tension and the resentment, has somehow become something that I know about, from comments here and there, from picking up pieces. I do not know why my uncle stole the ashes and I do not know why he threw them around the locked ward, maybe he was trying to show his father the place he had been abandoned to, maybe the courtyard was a place of solace for him. I do not know if it was spiteful or desperate or compassionate. I would imagine there are a multitude of reasons and depending on context my uncle is likely to remember the one that seems most appropriate each time he thinks of it; memory does not like to be constrained.

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Mum didn’t like 12. The Psychiatric Superhero when she first read it. She was irritated with me and said that I should credit my uncle for the character names that I have used. The Psychiatric Superhero and The Lorikeet are names that my uncle used in his own stories to talk about himself and his mother. You can see his paintings and read his stories at www.jamesdeblas.com. 12. The Psychiatric Superhero is about reinterpreting a night that I had not understood as a child. Acquiring new knowledge of an old memory takes it from the child and turns it into a sophisticated adult memory with layers and depth and context. Freud has termed this reinterpreting of memory Nachträglichkeit, or afterwardsness/deferred action. In On Flirtation Phillips explains that “in one sense, Freud’s theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience” (33). After The Lorikeet read 12. The Psychiatric Superhero she rang me up and told me that a couple of years before they dug up the locked ward I had asked her where Alfredo’s stone was. She did not have an answer for me but she decided she wanted one. When the hospital closed a few years later she saw her chance. By asking The Lorikeet about my grandfather’s headstone I convinced her to go back to The New Norfolk Insane Asylum and gather his ashes. I cannot imagine a more circular conclusion to this confused puzzle of mine.

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With pieces that deal with a more distant past like 12. The Psychiatric Superhero, 2. Tigerlily, 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing and 6. Taxi and I Killed a Dog, I am interested in the triggers that bring these memories into the present. My mum is working on her PhD in schizophrenia at the moment so she is exploring both her own experience around her brother’s illness and the experiences of those she is meeting through her research. Her constant chatter about her study could have been what triggered these memories. Another potential trigger came when My Supervisor said that one of my other pieces, 18. Love Story, which is in part about my fear of mental illness, is not clear, and that I should express my anxiety more clearly. I had been thinking that a story about my uncle might help the reader make the connection without me having to dictate how my work should be read.

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14. MARCHING DOWN SWANSTON (75)

Telephone is marching down Swanston Street towards

Flinders Street Station with seven minutes until the last train.

Breathing out steam; breathing in frost, she races to meet

Quick with leftovers from work in a takeaway container and a

can of peach ice tea. She is tired and it’s freezing.

Nearly there, she pictures them being rocked half to sleep by

the rattle sway of the train. A worn out heap of dirty hair and

jackets.

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15. NAKED IN HIS BED (100)

She is naked in his bed seeing him not see her. His absent

look that tells her he still hasn’t bought condoms. It has been a

month. It was a joke for a while. She could have bought them

herself but something told her to wait and see what would

happen. Behind the frustration she had started to wonder.

His disinterest tells her everything she needs to know. She is

naked in his bed and he is touching her. He’s touching her but

it has nothing to do with her.

She isn’t even there. Neither of them are.

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16. WET COAT (50)

She has no business being on this train taking her somewhere

she doesn’t want to go. Sewn into a wet coat, frustrated and

uncomfortable. Warm breath, skin crawling. There is a silence

their words aren’t filling.

Every cell inside her throws itself away from him, telling her to

get away. That she’s sinking.

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17. THE FRAGMENTS (14. Marching Down Swanston, 15. Naked in His Bed and 16. Wet Coat) The sudden and the fragmentary are such wicked bedfellows. The sudden is often shocking, a break with the expected. We are unable to process the implications of what has just happened immediately, or see the whole picture at once, in perspective. However, Gornick believes that we begin to make “large sense of things, even as experience is overtaking us” (The Situation and the Story 24). 14. Marching Down Swanston, 15. Naked in His Bed and 16. Wet Coat came out of this drive for making “large sense” in the moment. Because sudden memoir attempts to constrain the event it describes in narrative before the shock has subsided and the implications have been fully processed, the picture is easily fragmented. 14. Marching Down Swanston, 15. Naked in His Bed and 16. Wet Coat started off as parts of larger pieces. They were sad, indulgent over-tellings of the breakdown of my relationship with the boy you know as Quick. I said to My Supervisor, I have these four pieces, two old and two new, I do not know if I want to use any of them. She came back to me a week later. She had picked out a couple of lines from each and crossed out the rest. What I was doing, with all the over-telling and explaining, with the filler around what became 14. Marching Down Swanston, 15. Naked in His Bed and 16. Wet Coat, was trying to decipher what had happened and what was still happening. I was so

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close to what I was trying to write that I could not see what I was trying to say. I struggled to find the story amid the chaos. While I was writing these pieces I had very little emotional distance from what they depict. If I were to rewrite them today, with two months separating me from what happened, I might be able to craft them with precision. I might be able to exert control over the tone, the phrasing, the structure; something I was incapable of doing when these moments were still alive, when they still had consequences. They might also not be so fragmentary. I might have been able to sustain the narrative but they would not be so raw, so unpolished, so intimate. In “Writing and the Flesh of Others” Gibbs asks “can one lovingly consume a text while it’s still alive… or must a body of work be put to death, be dead meat, in order to be digested?” (311). I ask that question in relation to forcing the “sudden” into narrative. Can we write of the very recent past, while it still affects us? Or must it be dead, resolved, finished with, for it to be devoured and reproduced?

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18. LOVE STORY (400)

Eyes open in the dark, you wonder what she is really like,

what she is like when you’re not watching. Your friends

don’t like her much. Quick doesn’t like her at all. It doesn’t

sit well, how they could be so close to you and still find her

so unpleasant. But she can be, you know she can.

The hours that you lose track of her are so small in

comparison to the stacks of days that you’re together.

Waking up and realising that she got away is exhausting.

She betrayed you again; you delight in her recklessness.

It takes a few nights for you to gather a clearish picture of

what she got up to while she lost you, who she hurt and

how she survived. How she got you home in one piece.

Everything makes more sense when you’re close, when

you’re one person, breathing together, seeing together. She

thinks in a way that excites you; she lets you be a part of it.

But she’s dark and she is threatening. When you bury

her she hides and she waits until you’ve forgotten, then

she’ll throw herself at you, come out hissing through your

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teeth, breaking windows before you’ve realised what has

happened.

You’ve lost any control you thought you had over her. She’s

ripping up your safety nets. Do you want her to? You feel

the swell of her, breathing in: a dragon waking. The thrill, the

risk, the threat of what she might do if you don’t keep watch

makes you light headed and magnetic. You’re laughing,

raucous and rude. You’re falling away and her grip takes

over. You don’t mind. She’s more real than you could ever

be. You watch her shake up your friends. Saying things to

push them in the direction of her fancy. Breaking rules they

don’t know they follow.

You’re not here but they don’t know it yet. They feel a

closeness; she plays with their intimacy. She’ll confess, some

of it true, some of it not quite, just to know what they’ll do, hear

what they’ll say. These moments of closeness are addictive,

this breaking down of boundaries. It is hearing something

outside your house and walking out into the dark. Daring what

will happen to happen.

Her intimacy is volatile. At some stage the fun will slow, your

friends will tire of holding their hands over the fire and want to

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dance. The music will bore her, the moving bodies won’t go

fast enough, she’ll look for something else. She needs you to

acknowledge her. She’ll find a way to make you think about

her tomorrow, once you’ve buried her again.

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19. MANIA (100)

Can’t sleep.

A mania for confrontation drives her out of bed and into the dark.

Her car pulls her through suburban streets on a hallucinatory

trajectory. She arrives at his house. The front gate is locked;

she climbs it. The lights are off.

Something has to happen.

Unable to turn back, unwilling to knock, her arms hold her

together against the nervous cold.

There is something comforting about the cool glass of his

sliding door against her forehead.

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20. THE PULL (700)

For so long they had circled each other in the dark, catching

eyes, looking away; avoiding the pull. What selfish fun they’d

been having; gluttonous with impossible desire. All the times

they’d found each other, deep in the night, the others had

fallen away and his words and her words had clung to each

other. She’d say it’s too late, we tried; he’d say but now I

know. Then they would get melancholy or he would kick

something and walk away.

Telephone realises how pathetic they are, how lazy; too

enthralled with how they see themselves in the other’s eyes to

move past this. Pigeon thinks he’s Camus’ Mersault, apathetic

and detached. His dark moods hidden behind comic timing

and recklessness. Telephone worries about him, but more than

that - his shadow lures her with the temptation of seedy

mistakes and dark thinking.

They’re out, together. Her friends have gone home. His friends

are somewhere else, in another room. They stand close,

elbows and hips. Holding drinks as Revolver sucks in and spits

out people they don’t notice. They talk about their ugly

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thoughts, the selfish things they do, the people they

disappoint. They talk about 5. An Introduction to Not

Knowing. Pigeon tells Telephone he showed it to his mum,

that his mum thinks she is in love with him.

Hours slide by, they move around, they go outside, they sit

on the couch, they find his friends, they move back to the bar.

Pigeon tells her that she is beautiful. She tells him that Quick

avoids her and how he doesn’t want to sleep with her. She

shouldn’t have told him that, Pigeon says it makes him feel

ok about wanting to take her home. Their words and their

intentions gather in their clothing like cigarette smoke. Time

doesn’t follow a pattern. She’s been moving around in a blur,

an electric blur of distraction and temptation. The tension that

has followed them since last November when in the fire

escape at her work he said you have no idea how much I

want to kiss you pulls like elastic between them. It pulls and

they pull and then they walk away.

She is about to leave. It’s 8 am and she told Quick she’d stay

at his house. If she doesn’t get there soon he’ll be waking up

alone. She should leave. She wonders if Quick even wants

her in his bed. He hasn’t for so long. Telephone decides to

leave. She makes it down two flights of stairs and walks out

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onto bright, cold Chapel Street. Her phone asks her where

she is. It’s Pigeon. She tells him to come out the front.

The sun is up, they’ve been talking and touching around this for

hours, for months. There is a poisonous undercurrent between

them, making her dizzy and determined like the mosquito

bloodied walls of her childhood. She is sick of the circling, the

luring and being lured. She knows that she has him. She takes

his hand and pulls him into the alleyway behind them.

Her murky blotted-ink eyes stare up at him, thick with intent.

It’s the worst idea but she is delusional with her need to

disappoint the boy who doesn’t see her. She pulls him until

he’s pushing her back against the brick wall behind her, her

hands against his hips, her teeth pulling at his lip, her nails in

his shoulders. Mouths breathing open and loud he says, We

shouldn’t. She says, Shut up. His hands push up her dress,

he’s grasping at her and she thinks, we shouldn’t. Shut up.

She pushes him back, the alleyway is thin, a meter wide. His

back against the wall, her hands pull at his long hair. He’s telling

her she makes him crazy but she isn’t listening. She doesn’t

want to be here. She says good night and walks away.

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21. THREATENING THE FUTURE (18. Love Story, 19. Mania and 20. The Pull) 18. Love Story, 19. Mania and 20. The Pull consider the future and question the implications of narrative drive. In 18. Love Story the second person narrator talks recklessly about Telephone’s future. In 19. Mania Telephone is overtaken by the story; the narrative drive more powerful than she is. Finally, Telephone forces narrative resolution in 20. The Pull. 18. Love Story explores the multiple self through a dark depiction of the reckless side of Telephone. When My Supervisor first read 18. Love Story she asked if it was a sex thing. I was taken aback; I had thought it was clear what this piece was about; fear of disconnection, insanity, multiple selves, dark thinking, what hides beneath the surface. Looking back I see what she meant. There is an eroticism to destructive behaviour. 18. Love Story talks about putting sides of yourself ahead of friends and partners. 18. Love Story also talks about privileging sides of yourself over other sides of yourself. Referring to his homosexuality in “A Weedy Garden” Lisicky asks: “If I can’t make use of the whole of me, then aren’t I participating in a more complex form of self-erasure?” (2.) I wondered whether a depiction of this darker side of myself belonged in this collection of stories. To leave her out seemed like a potential form of “self-erasure”. As I arrive at the conclusion of this project I am realising that the consequence of writing one version of the self is that others fade in comparison.

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Giving voice to various selves in Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home has not eased this tension inherent in depicting the self. In “Understanding Popular Culture” Fiske writes that when the dominant system incorporates signs of resistance into their discourse they attempt to “rob them of any oppositional meanings” (114). In 10. Speaking for You I discuss how including Elevator’s resistance to my depiction of what happened in 8. Forty Degree Summer invalidates her opposition. With 18. Love Story I have written a self that contrasts with my usual repertoire of selves. Like Elevator in 8. Forty Degree Summer, I have found that by incorporating this side of myself into the dominant discourse of this work I have robbed her of her opposition. My attempt to write the multiple-self became an exercise in “self-erasure”. On a different level 18. Love Story is about the consequences of narrative nonfiction writing. When I wrote 18. Love Story I had been thinking about the way I see the world when I write. When I was younger I used to go through long phases of feeling as though I was living behind glass. I saw myself as Chbosky’s Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower whose teacher tells him that “sometimes people use thoughts to not participate in life” (24). Spending so much time writing introspectively this year has forced me to consider what the implications of being an observer might be. Living this project, I found myself projecting narrative ahead of the present moment, beyond anything I had yet experienced. I was anticipating narrative development as though I was

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reading my life instead of living it. The need to have something to write about loomed over me. So I followed the path that appeared to be laid out before me. I lived outside of myself, watching with remove as I navigated the day to day, seeing myself as a character. 19. Mania embodies this delirium. In this piece Telephone is puppet-like, following orders that seem to come from outside herself. She knows that she should not turn up at Quick’s house but she does it anyway. In writing about myself as Telephone I became fatalistic in my need to let things play out. Rather than intervening in my own life, it was as if, in my attempt to be ready for the “sudden”, I predicted what would happen and how I would react and what I would feel, and then allowed myself to make it happen. 20. The Pull came out of this fatalism. In “The Ethics of Betrayal” Miller says that “what appears to happen suddenly always appears to have been building insidiously” (49). What happened in 20. The Pull is, to an extent, a result of my compulsion for narrative drive. By placing 3. The End and 5. An Introduction to Not Knowing early on in Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home I prepared Telephone and the reader for what happened in 20. The Pull. When I first tried to write 20. The Pull, the day after it happened, I found myself wrestling with flowery guilt and bad similes. It took a few days for me to realise that it needed to be written in the present tense, instead of the past tense. Writing in the present tense limited my scope to what had

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happened and what I had thought about that night, it demanded that I leave out the guilt and the remorse. Reading 20. The Pull is difficult for me. It represents something I would rather not think about. The thought of anyone reading it, especially Quick, makes me uncomfortable. I worry that it would be read at face value. Elevator read it and said she did not like it because I did not feel bad about what I had done. The tone of the piece is difficult to take, but that is what I like about it. Instead of wallowing in what a terrible person I was that night, the piece captures the way it felt. Had I tried to write about my regret it would seem finished, resolved, and it is not. Reading 20. The Pull I remember what it was like being that girl. I feel the weight of consequence projected onto the story from the present. The abrupt writing takes me back into the moment. 20. The Pull uses sudden memoir to immortalise the shock of making this mistake. Miller has also questioned the ‘nature of harm in… a story motivated by disappointed love or sexual betrayal’ (44) and while I am not sure what the harm might be, I was very much aware that writing 20. The Pull had implications reaching out into the future. The sense that this piece was integral to the collection became more important to me than the feelings of the people this piece was likely to hurt. By deciding to write 20. The Pull in this way I was making very real decisions about my life and my priorities. In writing 20. The Pull I risked my friendship with Pigeon, and I made sure that Quick would have to know about what had happened.

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22. IT’S NOT FUNNY (25)

She told Taxi what she’d done and they laughed. Taxi said it’s

like the time we killed that dog. It’s not funny but I’m laughing.

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23. GOING HOME (1800)

Telephone works until midnight. She walks out of the

restaurant without signing off or saying goodbye, she hails a

taxi and holds her breath.

Gaia and The Captain are already asleep when she arrives.

Telephone puts the kettle on and goes upstairs to Baby’s

room. Her parents don’t want to make Telephone’s bed in her

empty room for just one night so she is in with her sister. Ohh

hay baby sistah, make room for me. Telephone climbs up onto

Baby’s bed moving aside the year twelve textbooks and the

notes. No more study, I’m making tea.

Baby looks at her big sister, her silly sister who she knows

better than anyone. They were a team. Pinky and the Brain,

Telephone tall and clever but wandering, Baby short and

practical with the ability to see through her older sister’s acting.

Telephone yanks off her skinny, black, coffee stained jeans.

They get caught around her ankles, she hops and trips out of

them, undoing buttons of her black work shirt then giving up

half way and pulling it over her head. Baby watches as she

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scans her Facebook newsfeed, mildly amused by her sister.

Telephone scavenges around in Baby’s bottom draw, finding a

singlet and pyjama shorts.

From downstairs they hear the kettle click off. Telephone

bounces out of the room and along the corridor. Sitting still,

legs crossed beneath her, Baby goes along with Telephone’s

game. She knows her sister is tired and unsure and holding

onto anything she can, so she plays along with Telephone’s

slumber party. Baby hears mugs being pulled out of the

cupboard, the sugar jar being moved and the fridge opening.

One of the boys from her class has uploaded photos from the

night before. Her cheeks look round and her chest looks broad.

Baby withholds the urge to untag. Trawling through Perez

Hilton Baby sees unfortunate photos of the beautiful and the

celebrated. Telephone hates these websites, she tells Baby not

to read them, like with the supermarket magazines Telephone

doesn’t feel the pleasure. They make you sad little sister.

Telephone hasn’t come back. Baby knows where she is.

Crying into golden fur, breathing in the toxic that has taken

over the garage; a combination of the cancer leaking out of

Ed’s nose and the medicine pushing through his skin. Pablo

will be on Ed’s bed, Ed on Pablo’s. Pablo will be looking away,

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ashamed by the affection. Ed will look at Baby’s big sister with

knowing. He will watch the salt run down her face, feel her

holding back the push in her lungs.

Telephone is angry and detached. Her resentment aches. The

relentless taste of love holds her to him. His malting fur matted

with her tears soothes her. Telephone will indulge in seeing

herself become Lucy, crying into Aslan. She will indulge in

imagery until she feels sick with herself. Baby wonders if she

should leave her worn down sister alone with the sadness she

doesn’t know how to hold. Baby worries about her sister.

Telephone doesn’t keep secrets, somewhere amidst the

confusion of stories and confessions she tricks her audience

into believing her noise. No one Baby knows understands

themselves more or knows themselves less than her big sister.

Telephone was eleven, Baby was eight, they brought Ed home

in a cardboard box. Gaia and The Captain went out for dinner,

the baby-sitter sat on the couch. The sisters fought over the

television. It took them until the ads to notice Ed was gone.

They found him in the kitchen. The curtains weren’t closed and

he was sitting in front of the night window, crying at the

brothers and sisters he saw in his reflection. Baby picked him

up and held him in her warm. Baby is soft and tactile and has

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real fears. She knows how to be hurt by words, careless boys,

and cruel girls. She knows how to care for the hurting.

Enough time has passed, Baby gets up, finds her ugg boots

under the bed and follows her sister downstairs. In the kitchen

she finds half made tea and the back door open. Baby makes

noise as she approaches, giving Telephone time to sit up and

contain the dull moan punching out of her chest.

Ed looks at Baby over Telephone’s shoulder. Pablo, still

defiant, looks away. Baby has cried already. She is sad but

that sadness has a place. Telephone turns away, refusing to

let the hurt in, thinking the loss but holding the door closed

on feeling it. Baby moves into the thick smelly air and sits on

the dog bed with Ed and her sister. The three of them sit

there, still for a while. Telephone manages her breathing and

Baby asks if she is ready for tea.

They go back inside after kissing Ed and Pablo goodnight.

Telephone refuses to look back as she crosses the threshold

into the house. The girls make tea, Baby tells Telephone about

the first weeks of year twelve. Telephone tells Baby about what

it is like living with Taxi. They leave their mugs in the kitchen

sink and climb upstairs, drained and ready for bed.

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They mean to wake up at 7.00 to go on the daily walk to the dog

beach with Gaia and The Captain but they sleep through it. They

wake up at 8.30 and go downstairs throwing cardigans over

singlets. The Captain asks the girls what they want for breakfast.

Gaia is at her coffee machine, Who wants a coffee?

They sit outside at the wooden table. The boys are salty and

sandy from their walk, Ed is like a puppy, rolling around and

Pablo is surprised to lose the upper hand in their play. Auntie

comes around, Telephone and Baby didn’t know that she was

coming. She says sad things, irritating them with her sincerity.

The Captain comes out with a carrot. Dad, Ed doesn’t want

vegetables today! Give him sardines. The Captain says, Carrot

is Eddy’s favourite. Silly girls, they don’t know anything, do they

Ed? Ed’s tail wags, hitting Gaia’s chair. The Captain dances

around with the carrot held high. He makes them all laugh. The

happy scene adds to the pace of the steamrolling deadline. 8.52.

Telephone holds her coffee but cannot drink it. The Captain

feeds Ed the carrot in pieces. They jump around, Ed and The

Captain, brothers and friends. Everyone tries to ignore what is

coming. 8.57. There is laughing around the table. Morose

laughter. Telephone jokes and does not register the sad,

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streaming track marks on her singlet. Gaia and Baby level the

mood, saying the right things. Auntie goes on, it’s so sad, it’s

so sad. The Captain is agitated, moving around, stop-start.

Gaia stands up and clears the cups. The Captain takes this

cue and gets Ed’s lead. Pablo, come on, get on your mat.

Good boy Pabby. Stay on your mat.

Oh, he knows. Auntie is saying. Telephone walks away. She

turns her back on Pablo, daring him to disappoint her. Pablo

probably won’t care that Ed, his only loyal friend, is gone. She

walks away from Auntie’s dog whispering and Pablo’s disinterest.

Ed wags his tail as The Captain puts his lead on. His big open

smile rips seams in Telephone’s patched up walls. Gaia takes

his lead and Ed trots the whole way to the vet. They turn left

instead of the usual right towards the beach. Ed races them

there, his enthusiasm convinces Telephone that it isn’t time.

There is a cat in a cage inside the vet. Ed jumps up and down,

play fighting, barking. The cat is unimpressed and turns away.

The vet comes in and takes them to small room. There is a rug

on the floor. Ed, sit down, sit on the rug. Ed is distracted by the

cat. He whines. Telephone bites on the frustration being hurled

up from her stomach and slamming on the back of her teeth.

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He’s not sick, he’s not old. It’s too soon. Auntie and Baby sit

on the two plastic seats. Telephone sits on the floor opposite

the rug. The Captain stands at the door, leaning against the

wall. Gaia stands for a bit but then decides to sit down next to

Telephone. Ed rests his head in Telephone’s lap.

The lovely, subtle, cheery vet explains what will happen. This

is the green dream, it is three injections that will stop his

breathing and then stop his heart. She also has a tranquiliser

that she’d rather not use unless she has to, if Ed won’t calm

down. Ed is too busy thinking about the cat to lie down and die

like an old dog, it’s 9.15 and his time has run out. The vet

gives him the tranquiliser.

It happens quickly, the injections go in, one after the other.

Once the third injection is in Ed is still and empty. Telephone

holds his paw; the vet says that he is gone. There was no

moment where she knew. He slipped away and she didn’t even

notice him leaving. The Captain moves away. Business like he

asks about payment. An invoice will be sent to your home

address, the vet says. She wipes her eyes and leaves the room.

Ed stays on the rug while the family start moving away. Baby

wants to know what will happen to him, do we bury him? The

Captain tells her that he will be cremated with the other pets.

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The image of all the family pets being burned to dust together

is morbid but it comforts Telephone.

The procession moves slowly in the opposite direction. Gaia

holds Telephone’s left hand, tight. Auntie talks. The Captain

and Baby are quiet.

At home Pablo comes running. He gets to them and then he

knows. Telephone knows he knows. And the agony she feels

for Pablo who has lost his companion stings like fire and salt.

Telephone feels spaceless and hollow and dry.

Baby and Telephone make tea. The Captain turns on the

television, it’s some sort of racing, cars or motorbikes, not

horses. They chat and they laugh and they cry. Time moves

slowly now. As the afternoon wares on she notices the house

has rhythms that she hadn’t picked up on before; rhythms she

isn’t a part of. With the realisation that it’s over, Telephone

says goodbye and makes her way back to her new home.

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24. POSSUMS (25)

The door slides open; her giant small boy in pyjamas. He says,

I heard strange noises; I thought it was the possums. Do you

want to come in?

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25. DRAWING A LINE (22. It’s Not Funny, 23. Going Home and 24. Possums) I do not think that Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home calls for a grand ending. Sudden memoir tells unresolved stories; the memoirist is still too close to the narrative for the “resultant catharsis or evolution” Friedrich talks about in “Seeing (through) Red” (60). In sudden memoir the memoirist is unlikely to “come to terms with the problems being expressed” by the time they conclude their work (Friedrich 160). Lazar is critical of “the drawing of conclusions and epiphanies that seem laboured” (“An Introduction to Truth” x) in memoirs. He goes as far to suggest that these sorts of “falsehoods” (x) might be more worthy of consideration than many readers’ fixation with the “real” (x). I have used 22. It’s Not Funny, 23. Going Home and 24. Possums to get as close to tying up loose ends as I am comfortable with. I have given you something like a conclusion in terms of friendship, family and love. 22. It’s Not Funny, 23. Going Home and 24. Possums consider places and people that feel safe. They are about the changing notion of home and the space before nostalgia: the realisation that something is changing but not being far away enough to see it as being in the past. 22. It’s Not Funny is short but it does quite a few meaningful things. It highlights the loyalty between Taxi and Telephone as well as demonstrating that the accident from 6. Taxi and I

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Killed a Dog has become a part of their mythology. Because 22. It’s Not Funny is the first creative piece after 20. The Pull the implication is that Taxi’s comment is read as a response to what Telephone and Pigeon did in 20. The Pull. 22. It’s Not Funny also talks about shock in a way that I really like. I found 23. Going Home difficult to write. Even as it happened I knew that I would eventually turn these moments into a story, but I did not know how to approach the grief that I felt. It took a couple of weeks for me to be ready to write 23. Going Home. I was at a friend’s holiday house, the others all went out but I stayed back because I was reading One Day by Nicholls and I was nearly at the end. The tragic conclusion comes out of nowhere. I finished the book and cried for a little bit. Then I found my laptop and, trancelike, wrote 23. Going Home in an hour. Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story that “without detachment there can be no story” (12). With the safe sadness procured for me by One Day, I found myself in a state where I could access the emotion of 23. Going Home from a distance. In the first half of 23. Going Home the third person narrator spends a lot of time interpreting the scene from Baby’s point of view. Even in third person I found introspection impossible and only managed to write fluidly once I allowed Telephone to stand behind her sister. Earlier, in 10. Speaking For You, I discussed hiding behind Baby and I mentioned how I do a similar thing in 23. Going Home. I found that Telephone’s voice was too hostile for the piece I needed to write. While this story is about putting the family dog to sleep, it is also about

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Telephone and I loosing another link to our childhood and our family home. Baby’s perspective allowed me to tell a story of shaken loss, rather than an aggressive rant. I have been told that introductions and conclusions should be like bookends. I like to read 24. Possums as a response to 2. Tigerlily. I imagine both of these pieces in soft lighting, probably because Gaia and Quick make me feel safe in a similar way. The possums Quick thinks are at his door remind me of the Seuss-like creatures from Gaia’s dream. As I led you into 2. Tigerlily I promised you ease and I have decided to leave you gently. I do not want you to worry about what might happen next. I have not been generous to Quick in this depiction of our lives. What I have written in Ten Deranged Girls and a Dog Walk Home is true but it is not the truth. It all happened but it is not all that happened. I decided to draw a close on this body of work with Quick opening his bedroom door and letting me in. 24. Possums is a small moment that I owe him; that I owe us both. When I began this project I thought that I would come up with a technique that would enable me to wrestle truth onto the page. My planning involved annotation, interviews, and stage directions. I wanted to be able to exert control over my subconscious, lay it out bare and beating in front of me. I was going to find a method for regulating the construction of narrative nonfiction. I thought that I would be able to achieve

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this through sudden memoir. I believed that sudden memoir, in its immediacy, would bring the memoirist closer to the version of herself that experienced the events that she writes about. Without great spans of time separating the sudden memoirist from the event, I thought that memory would not be left to edit and rearranging memories unchecked. In my sudden memoir the narrator fragmented in order to be able to say what she needed to say. I was selecting emotional threads and leaving everything else out. I found that with sudden memoir the memoirist is forced to decide which story to tell, what to include and what to discard, and in doing so the sudden memoirist consciously shapes her own memory. The further I delved into this project the less I held truth up as an ideal. There is no omniscience and there is no objectivity when it comes to our own lives and the lives of the people we know; because of this the memoirist is an inherently unreliable narrator. It is the memoirist’s subjectivity and her struggle with boundaries that distinguishes memoir from fiction. In fiction the story begins and ends with what is inside the book, whereas in memoir, the world behind the story is bigger and infinitely more complex than what exists on the page. In memoir the story and the narrator keep moving. The story continues to write and rewrite itself as the memoirist keeps living. This is where I leave you.

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ANOTHER PART OF YOU

Do we know it yet? Do we know that the days we’ve imagined

are brighter than you can draw, softer than I know how to

word.

Can you hear me - the night sky is so heavy. Can you

remember me - before I was just another part of you? Do I

remember you, or do I have to wait for retrospect?

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ten deranged girls and a dog walk home

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