‘Mothers & Others' edited by Natalie Kon-yu, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, Miriam Sved and Maya Linden

From the BLURB:

'When are you having children?' 'Why didn't you have another child?' 'Well, I guess that's your choice, but...'

They are questions asked of women of a certain age all the time. Beneath them is the assumption that all women want to have children, and the judgment that if they don't, they'll be somehow incomplete. And that's only the beginning...

Being a mother, or not being a mother, has never been so complicated. The list of rights and wrongs gets longer daily, with guilt-ridden mothers struggling to keep on top of it all, and non-mothers battling a culture that defines women by their wombs.

In this collection of fiction and non-fiction stories, Australian women reflect on motherhood: how it should be and how it really is. Their stories tackle everything from the decision not to have children to the so-called war between working and stay-at-home mums. Including special contributions by Rosie Batty and Deborra-Lee Furness, the stories explore every topic from infertility and IVF, to step-parenting and adoption, to miscarriage and breastfeeding, child meltdowns and marriage breakdowns, as well as giving a much-needed voice to those who won't ever be called 'Mum'.

‘Mothers & Others: Australian writers on why not all women are mothers and not all mothers are the same’ is the 2015 anthology collection of stories from editors Natalie Kon-yu, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, Miriam Sved and Maya Linden. This is the same writers group – turned editorial team – who put out one of my favourite 2013 books: ‘Just Between Us’, an anthology all about female friendships.

I adored ‘Just Between Us’, not only for the calibre of female authors assembled – but more for the honest explorations into dynamics, which are so often misconstrued and misunderstood or just missing from all forms of fiction and storytelling – the female friendship. I mean; there’s a reason the Disney musical ‘Frozen’ was seen as groundbreaking for being a film in which the sister’s friendship takes precedence above all else, and is the true heart of the story. For much the same reason, ‘Mothers & Others’ is a groundbreaking and heart-warming tribute to the many facets of motherhood, which – upon reading the offerings from 28 marvellous writers – you quickly realise, is often lazily presented elsewhere as nuclear, one-dimensional and untrue. This anthology absolutely delivers on its promise, as it; ‘holds a mirror up to the most romanticised, demonised and complex roles women play: those of mother or non-mother, and daughter.’

There’s a quote from a Jodi Picoult book called ‘Vanishing Acts’ that has stayed with me, and I don’t know why; “There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its centre; it is the human condition.” But it revibrated with me while reading certain non-fiction stories from particular writers in this anthology, those especially who have long and illustrious careers writing about the topics of family, relationships and belonging. What fascinated me was their non-fiction writing about their changed circumstances, and how this has impacted on their writing or will inform their future stories, no doubt.

The book opens, for instance, with a non-fiction story from Alice Pung – an incredible Australian author known for her memoir writing, who has explored topics around her family’s fleeing the killing fields of Cambodia to settle in Australia in ‘Unpolished Gem’ and the heartstrings of family versus her need for independence in ‘Her Father's Daughter’. Her short story ‘The New Grandparents’ explores both familiar and new terrain as she moves into a new phase of her life as a first-time mother, suddenly bringing a sharper understanding perhaps, to all that she has written about in her memoirs;

Almost three and a half decades later, their firstborn – a child they named after the girl in Lewis Carroll’s book, because they thought Australia was a Wonderland – is having her firstborn. They didn’t know whether they would survive the war, let alone get to this lucky point in life. 

—   ‘The New Grandparents’ by Alice Pung

New York Times Bestselling author Liane Moriarty has been very open about the reasons so many of her female characters have tackled fertility issues and the crushing blows of miscarriage, IVF-treatment or faced the possibility of never having children. ‘Three Wishes’, ‘What Alice Forgot’, and ‘The Last Anniversary’ have all featured characters struggling to get pregnant, or worrying that it’s too late for them. 'The Hypnotist's Love Story' also featured an especially intriguing female character who had to come to terms with being dumped by her partner, and consequently losing the connection she had established with his young son, whom she’d helped raise for a time. Moriarty has spoken about how her own real-life struggles with these topics influenced her writing, and most recently I was listening to a Sydney Writers’ Festival podcast of her 2015 appearance, in which she talked about the many female readers who reach out to her with thanks or anger for hitting so close to home on these topics. In her non-fiction story ‘The Childless Side of the Room’, Moriarty reflects on a gym class in which a guileless female instructor (and new mum) asks her class to split the room according to parents and non-parents (to highlight how well the parents – battling busy schedules – still find time to fit in fitness, apparently). Moriarty, though now a mother of two, finds herself reflecting on how her past-self would have taken to such battle-line instruction when she was at her lowest point of infertility and struggles to conceive. It’s a gut-wrenching, open-bruise sort of short story – a confessional and an olive branch to any woman going through what Moriarty came out the other side of. And it’s a refined understanding of how these topics can still lay so close to her heart that they’re recurring themes and explorations in so many of her books, even years after she gave birth to her two children;

My main memory of that time is the way I always had to hold myself: stiffly, carefully, as if I were a tall glass of messy emotions that might break or spill at any moment. And still, the shame, the everlasting shame, because all this was my fault: because I was so old; because I’d taken too long to start trying; because I’d messed it up, buttercup.  

—   ‘The Childless Side of the Room’ by Liane Moriarty

Melina Marchetta returns to ‘Mothers & Others’, having contributed the brilliant fictional short story ‘The Centre’ to the first anthology – but this time Marchetta is offering up a non-fiction and very personal slice, in a story titled ‘Of a Lesser God’. Here, Marchetta writes a letter to her child – ‘B’ – whom she has recently adopted, as she details the first year of their lives together. Given that Marchetta has built a career writing groundbreaking YA books about identity and displacement – a recurring theme from her contemporary ‘Looking for Alibrandi’ to high fantasy and ‘Finnikin of the Rock’ – there’s something incredibly touching here, to read her sharp insights and understanding translating so preciously to this new life she’s building for herself and B.   

Although I’m a bit greedy and want you all to myself, I also don’t want you to spend your life wondering where you came from, whether your birth parents loved you, who you look like. I understand the importance of identity. I’ve been writing about it most my life. 

—   ‘Of a Lesser God’ by Melina Marchetta

Deborra-Lee Furness – actress and ‘Adopt Change’ ambassador – also has a more academic and insightful non-fiction story in here about her path to motherhood. She cites the Convention of the Rights of the Child, United National treaty and the fact that 157 million children are without family (according to UNICEF) – in explaining why she’s campaigning so hard to make adoption easier in Australia and the rest of the world, for all families.

It’s important to note that these stories are not all non-fiction – five are fiction, and one in particular from Maxine Beneba Clarke titled ‘Paint’, will have you racing to pick up her phenomenal short story collection ‘Foreign Soil’ if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading it already. And not all these stories are about the mother-side of motherhood. Estelle Tang’s non-fiction piece ‘Motherland’ is about her being a child far away from home, having moved to New York – specifically examining ‘migrants mothers and children in the work of Colm Tóibín, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Roxane Gay.’

… the distance I put between us by moving overseas has shown me that we are not one entity, but two distinct individuals. Does that seem obvious to most people? It wasn’t to me, not for a long time. And now that I’m looking back at how in thrall I was to her, I’m surprised that I don’t feel more lost or damaged now that out relationship is attenuated. Many of my thoughts – casual or radical or laboured – are what my mother taught me. 

—   ‘Motherland’ by Estelle Tang

Coming into ‘Mothers & Others’ I’m one of the “others” (and that title is so tongue-in-cheek, I think, reflecting and perhaps criticising the way women who don’t fall neatly into the first are so often “othered” as a consequence) – regardless, I related hard to every single story within its pages.  Sometimes rather viscerally – as YA author Simmone Howell writes about turning to books to discover “what kind of writer-mother would I be?” in her short story ‘Writing Gully’ (an allusion to her wonderful YA book ‘Girl Defective’, which features the memorable and sensitive young child character called Gully). In this, Howell was investigating the balancing of writing and motherhood. But it got me thinking of the ways books have educated me on the intricacies of this side to life, I’d only ever had experience with as a daughter.

I became a novelist because I had a child. 

—   ‘The Mother Lode’ by Geraldine Brooks

    

I find that I’m not so strange to think that it’s through art and books that my understanding of mothering and motherhood has also been shaped – and I find it so fitting that Geraldine Brooks is in here too, offering a non-fiction story called ‘The Mother Lode’ (like Howell, exploring the connection of art and motherhood). I had just shared Brooks’ ‘The Year of Wonders’ as my #StellaSpark, you see, and in particular I remember being a teenager reading that book and being made to feel such a visceral connection to Anna Frith grieving for her children. This line from the book still haunts me; “My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint.”

That is, I realise, the gift of ‘Mothers & Others’ too. True, everyone could come to ‘Just Between Us’ and see facets of themselves and their lives – after all, we’ve all had and been friends, surely? Men and women alike? But some may think ‘Mothers & Others’ is less accessible – again, I think of that room being split in Moriarty’s story, of parents and not. But it’s not the case, and not just because these writers are so accomplished and poetic, to have opened a vein and bled (as Ernest Hemingway would have applauded.) There is universality here – yes, partly because even if you’re not a parent you are somebody’s child – but it’s deeper than that. These stories delve into instinct and love, mistakes and do-over’s, fractured lines, family ties and a loss so awful but does not lessen love or title. There’s more universe here than you may think.

5/5  

Interview with Christie Nieman, author of 'As Stars Fall'

It was my great pleasure recently, to read Christie Nieman’s contemporary YA debut ‘As Stars Fall’. I was really excited for this book for a few reasons – new voices in Aussie YA are always, always a wonderful thing, Christie is exploring a very emotional and recent event in Australian history and I knew of Christie as one of the editors behind a favourite anthology book of 2013 ‘Just Between Us: Australianwriters tell the truth about female friendship.’ I loved ‘As Stars Fall’ so much, that I jumped at the opportunity to ask some questions of this fresh new voice in Australian youth literature.

Q: How were you first published – agent or slush pile?

A strange third option actually. I had no agent but, through a project I was already working on with Pan Macmillan as one of five editors of an anthology (Just Between Us, 2013), I was able to have the Children’s Publisher there look at my whole manuscript without waiting to go through the slush pile. But I don’t know how much difference that connection made in the long run – earlier drafts of the manuscript had already managed to get through a couple of slush piles with the first 50 pages and a synopses, so I was fairly confident it would be able to do that again, and nothing will make a publisher go with a book except if they like it and think they want to sell it – so essentially I just cut out a step. I honestly believe that if your slush pile submission is professional and clean and engaging, it will get to the next stage, it might just take a bit longer. I think there is a horror of the slush pile, but personally I haven’t found it to be the dead end that myth and legend would have had me believe.

Q: Are you a ‘plotter’ or a ‘pantser’ - that is, do you meticulously plot your novel before writing, or do you ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ and let the story evolve naturally?

Both! I alternate between the states. I will usually start from a fragment that came out of nowhere but seems to hold something interesting of character and theme. Then I will go away and think and plan around that, usually with ‘concept’ high on the agenda and the characters supporting it. Then I will write according to my plan until I hit a brick wall that you can’t see in a plan, only in the writing. Then I will switch back to some free writing to see what solutions come out of it, and then go back to planning from the new bits.

Q: How long did it take you to write ‘As Stars Fall’, from first idea to final manuscript?

This is a bit embarrassing. The first fragment for this story happened twenty years ago. It contained the characters that went on to become Robin and Delia, and a bird being in a strange place – a place it shouldn’t really be – and there being some undescribed connection between the two girls and the bird. Then I went off and had fun in my twenties, and wrote other things, and earned a living, every now and then checked in to try and write bits of the story; but all the while the story resisted being worked on. And then about six years ago I met an endangered Bush Stone-curlew. And the bird in the fragment got its character and its meaning and it drew the whole thing together. I pretty much threw out everything I already had, and started collecting thoughts about ecology and life and death. I am a bit of a binge writer – I have to set aside a bank of time rather than little bits every day – so I had to work in casual jobs for months to save up enough money to stop work and spend a month writing, and then go back to work to save up for another month etc. So there are a few different answers to the question: 1) twenty years, 2) six years, or 3) probably about a year and a half of serious full time work.

Q: Where do story ideas generally start for you? Do you first think of the character, theme, ending? Or is it just a free-fall?

Rarely the ending, but often anything other than that. There always has to be a concept/theme in there somewhere for me – something I’m writing about – but often that will be suggested to me by a particular situation, or a character, or even a setting.

Q: I’ve called ‘As Stars Fall’; “a tender morsel of a novel, a ‘Silent Spring’ for young adults that also explores dramas of the heart in the wake of nature’s tragedy.” I’m wondering what sort of research you did, both for the environmental and psychological aspects of the book? From impact of bushfires on wildlife, to the human trauma associated with bushfires?

Getting this right was really important to me. I’m so glad you made the association with ‘Silent Spring’. The way that Carson’s work builds a kind of accessible bridge from the real work of scientists to the community – communicating in an engaging and insistent way those things that are the responsibility and concern of all of us, but which are so often left in the hands of people with vested interests, or those who are too busy working on it to talk about it – this was one of my main aims also (albeit through a different form and with a different audience). At one point I went back to university to study environmental science and management for a semester, and I learned so much in that six months – about the world around us, and about how we know the things we know, and about observational science – and it was there that I first came across the ecological concept of ‘disturbance’, which got me thinking about the processes of trauma, and how those complicated processes are the same across the whole spectrum of life, including human life. It is something that binds us to the rest of the natural world, rather than separates us. But I absolutely wanted to get the science right. My husband has a science degree and is a science communicator too, so his brains got heartily picked. And much of my research-thanks goes to Cassia Read, an ecologist who really understood the book and its intentions, and was more than just a safety net with fact-checking, but brought together her intimate knowledge of the science with an artistic sensibility to make connections I wouldn’t have been able to make on my own. She also found me the most appropriate reading material for the subject: I got good at reading science papers! I also did a lot of reading about trauma psychology and complicated grief, both related to, and unrelated to, bushfire. And I have known people who have suffered traumatic stress, again both related to, and unrelated to, bushfire. And I think as a human of a certain age I have had experiences which have cultivated an understanding of the strange landscape of complicated grief – its pit-traps and ladders and psychological tricks and magical thinking. And from my own personal experience I have found that a sense of kinship with the rest of the natural world can be incredibly helpful in those moments.

Q: You are an award-nominated playwright, and I was just wondering the differences and similarities between writing a play to be performed, and a novel to be consumed in solitary?

The main difference I think is the fact that a novel is a whole and complete thing – everything that will form the art of it is there on the page: in the words, the punctuation, the chapter- and section- divisions – the writer has a great deal of control; whereas a script is only part of the final art. Scripts are exciting because they rely on communicating with other artists who will contribute to the final piece – directors, actors, designers. Much of a script is you talking foremost to the director, and then to the other artists, those people who will mediate your vision to an audience; it is only in the dialogue or very specific plot-required action that you are speaking directly to the audience yourself as you would in a book. So you really have two levels of audience. And you have to respect the other artists who will be involved, even without knowing who they will be. You have to give them room to be artists, to let them interpret and present a moment in a way that works on the stage, rather than being too specific and didactic on the page – the page doesn’t matter. Having worked in theatre myself, I’ve seen the way that directors and actors draw great big red lines through paragraphs of overly-controlling stage-directions that are ‘telling them what to do’. This is a thing that I think transitioning writers often find challenging, that relinquishing of control, that handing over of decisions. It is quite an art to write something that is a skeleton, but that is also complete enough to communicate everything it needs to communicate. Whereas, in a novel, you are the director, the actors, the set-designer, the sound-person and the composer all at once. It’s a heady sense of power. It’s also more work. They are both incredibly satisfying in very different ways.

Q: There are three protagonists in ‘As Stars Fall’ – we get Robin’s first person narration, and then siblings’ Delia and Seth are told in third person. Who was the hardest to write, and which character’s voice or story came most vividly to you?

I think Robin’s was the easiest to write because her voice just natters along quite easily: essentially she’s having a conversation with you, the reader, so really, I just had to listen in. Whereas with Seth and Delia, it was like I was writing them – their internal worlds – almost without their permission: I had to get inside their experience more in order to convey it to the reader, whereas with Robin, she was quite happy to tell you about it herself. I suppose Seth’s internal world came most vividly to me, but I suspect that’s because such vivid things are happening to him.

But now, when I read the story back over, I find it is Delia’s voice that really sings to me – and that is strange as a writer, because it was with her voice that I took the most strictly technical approach: I came to writing up many of Delia’s sections later in the process and so I was trying to quite artificially differentiate her voice: I tried a particular grammatical modification in the prose, and I was never quite sure if it was entirely successful until I stepped right back. Perhaps that’s why I respond so well to those sections – because I’m able to come at them more with the experience of a reader. Ach, who knows!

Q: What’s the appeal in writing for younger readers?

I actually don’t really think about that too much when I’m writing – I know in writing classes in school you’re taught to think of your audience, and in fact when I did Year 12 we actually had to state specifically on the front of our writing pieces who our target audience was, but I have essentially found that a fairly useless exercise. Perhaps thinking of writing for an audience full stop can be useful to get that performative aspect that writing needs to have, but actually defining beyond that, I think that’s for publishers and marketing people. I think writers just write for other people, and people, no matter their age or interests, and really complicated and different. I think that sometimes the definition of ‘a particular group’ makes all the two-dimensional assumptions that anything targeted at ‘a particular group’ makes – the assumption that everyone is the same. I think assuming everyone reads something the same way is death for good writing – good writing relies on complicated reactions. I do however, seem to want to write teenaged characters. And I think the appeal there is that non-adult characters haven’t yet constructed and applied their comfortable adult personas. There is a lot of human truthfulness at the heart of a teenager, and when you couple that with the trying-on of various ideas of adult behaviour and personality, you can get something very dynamic, and more than that – something that can actually critique the way we run our adult societies. That’s why I think YA is for everybody, teenaged and adult alike. We are all just our teenaged selves adapted, in the best way we can manage, to adult society.

Q: What are you working on right now, and when can we expect it to his bookshelves? 

Gah! Okay, there’s an easy answer and a difficult answer to that. Easy answer: I’m working on another anthology, following on from the one mentioned earlier. I’m again editing with my co-editors, and also contributing a piece myself. And it will hit the shelves next April, all things being even. The difficult answer is that I’m working on another young adult novel which wades into the murky depths of belief systems, and the sometimes detrimental effects certain belief systems can have on young minds. The crystal ball on that one is coming up a bit murky itself on the question of bookshelves and hitting. So stay tuned.

Q: Favourite author(s) of all time?

Margaret Atwood, Colm Toibin, Sonya Hartnett, Helen Garner, Henry James, A.S. Byatt, David Malouf, Daphne du Maurier, Philip Pullman, Margaret Mahy, Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan, Kate Grenville, Lynne Reid Banks, Catherine Jinks, and did I mention Margaret Atwood? Oh, and Margaret Atwood.

Q: Favourite book(s)?

Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood. The Heather Blazing, Colm Toibin. Butterfly, Sonya Hartnett. The Millstone, Margaret Drabble, The Changeover, Margaret Mahy. The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan. Dark Places, Kate Grenville. Eye to Eye, Catherine Jinks. The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman. The Children’s Book, A.S.Byatt. My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier.

Q: Do you have any advice for budding young writers?

My only advice would be real world advice, and it is this. Money is important. Having a way to earn a living needs to be thought about. I didn’t think about it, I just thought about writing in this dogged dreamy way, and I think because of that I have spent much of my time working in low paid jobs which you need to work at A LOT just to pay bills, and which don’t buy a lot of other time to spend writing. I also think that if you can have a good and interesting part-time job that pays the bills but which also feeds the writing with experience – yours or other people’s – even better. That said, writing gets good when one apprentices oneself to the craft – and perhaps that can’t be done when one is chasing another career at the same time. There are examples of great writers who have managed it both ways, I suppose. Oh dear, talked myself out of giving solid advice. So I guess the answer to your question is: no, unfortunately, I don’t. Oh wait, actually, I do. Write. And also important: take feedback – but not all of it.

'As Stars Fall' by Christie Nieman

Received from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

In north-eastern Victoria, bush-covered hills erupt into flames. A Bush Stone-curlew escapes the fire but a woman studying the endangered bird does not.

When Robin's parents split up after the fire, her mother drags her from the country to a new life in the ugly city. Robin misses her dog, her best-friend, the cows, trees, creek, bushland and, especially, the birds. Robin is a self-confessed, signed-up, card-carrying bird-nerd. Just like her dad.

On the first day at her new school, Robin meets Delia. She's freaky, a bit of a workaholic, and definitely not good for Robin's image.

Delia's older brother Seth has given up school to prowl the city streets. He is angry at everything, but mostly at the fire that killed his mother.

When the Bush Stone-curlew turns up in the city parklands next to Seth and Delia's house the three teenagers become inextricably linked. Soon their lives are circling tighter and tighter around each other, and the curlew.

The book begins with a curlew watching a bushfire rage: 

The light was strange. The darkness was a deep red, and there was a thickness between the stars.

There is a human caught in the “stinging air”, and the curlew watches on as the human is, “Taken away. Bought forever to the stars.”

Thus begins Christie Nieman’s debut Australian YA novel, ‘As Stars Fall’.

From the beginning alone, readers will know that they are about to go on a somewhat harrowing journey made no less painful for the poignancy of Nieman’s masterful words. I was not surprised to discover that Christie Nieman is in fact a playwright, even being nominated for a Green Room Award for her play ‘Call me Komachi’. She sets the stage for this novel so beautifully – beginning with a scene many Australians will be familiar with. Even if you’re not someone who has found themselves and their town ravaged or threatened by bushfire, the summer seasons in Australia are often marked by a tragedy we are all too familiar with. Watching the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires on the TV, visiting the eerie memorial to the 2003 Canberra bushfires, I’ve even heard first-hand accounts of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires from my dad, who was a police officer at the time and sent to direct fleeing traffic. Nieman’s book begins from the point of view of a curlew bird watching the flames come, and then alternates to the perspective of a human woman about to be swallowed up by the fiery monster – it’s a viscerally frightening scene made even more so for the calm beauty of Nieman’s words, describing something so sinister and mindless. 

From there, we are introduced to three main players. There’s first-person narration from Robin Roberts (cruel parents), a country girl who has moved to the city with her mum – leaving behind her beloved Murramunda after fires ravaged the land.

Robin meets and reluctantly befriends a strange girl at her school called Delia … whose mother was the human that the curlew bird was watching in the beginning, being consumed by a firewall. 

Delia and her brother Seth’s chapters are in third person, perhaps a reflection of the disconnection they feel, living in the fallout of their mother’s tragic death. A lecturer, their mum was in the bush doing research on the bush stone-curlew – the very same bird that Delia notices Robin idly sketching during detention one day. 

Robin is, in fact, a “bird nerd” feeling unsettled in the concrete city jungle, partly because she misses the variety of birds. When Robin, Seth and Delia discover a bush stone-curlew in nearby parklands, the discovery binds them together ever tighter. 

Christie Nieman really needs to be commended – she’s clearly done a lot of research into the psychological impacts of bushfires, particularly on teenagers. Delia and Seth are coping in their own, very different ways. For Delia, it’s throwing herself into her mother’s research on the curlew and looking for connections and glimpses of fate in the wake of her loss. For Seth, it’s choosing oblivion with the drug ‘angel dust’, and many of his chapters read like wading through the smoky haze of his subconscious and self-hatred. 

Robin is also feeling the impact of the bushfires, but mainly in the displacement of home and the fractures she’s felt in her family; 

But two months ago, when the fire came through, all the birds disappeared. Dad said it was worse than any fire anyone had seen in decades. He said we were lucky that we’d had all our sheep up in the top paddock: we hadn’t lost any, not like some of our neighbours. The fire was fast and hot, which is bad. It killed someone, some woman up in the hills, not a local, right on the fire track where Dad and I used to go to collect wood. It was in all the papers. And the fire stripped so much of the landscape that only days after it went through, there were absolutely no birds left.  

I should have seen it as an omen, the birds all leaving like that. They left first, and then Mum and I left for the city a few weeks later. And I haven’t been back since. I don’t even know if any of them have returned.

I really loved that Nieman went into the range of loss for these characters – particularly because their pain is so viscerally connected to nature. This is really a recurring theme in the novel, as Nieman explores the side-by-side affects of disaster on both humans, nature and wildlife; 

And that’s the complicated thing about disturbance. It’s a natural part of an ecosystem. It compels life, it changes life, it makes like dynamic. It makes an ecosystem what it is, and it makes us who we are too. But it can be dangerous: give an ecosystem, or a person, too much disturbance, and it can drive them past their point of no return. 

I did occasionally feel quite cold towards Seth and Delia, but only because they felt deliberately distanced from readers with their third-person narration. Compared to Robin’s voice – vibrant, sometimes combative, a little bit cheeky – Delia and particularly Seth’s chapters were harder to get through. I appreciate that this was deliberate, and a way for Nieman to communicate just how disconnected the siblings are after the loss of their mother, but it was my response to their chapters nonetheless. 

‘As Stars Fall’ is a tender morsel of a novel, a ‘Silent Spring’ for young adults that also explores dramas of the heart in the wake of nature’s tragedy. Christie Nieman is bringing something very different to contemporary YA, and I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

4/5

'Just Between Us' by Maya Linden, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, Natalie Kon-Yu and Miriam Sved

Received from the Publisher

From the BLURB:

Empathetic, supportive and respectful... 

Or competitive, manipulative and downright bitchy?

Or somewhere in between?

In Just Between Us, a host of Australia's best-loved female writers bare all on this age-old quandary: Are female friendships all-natural and nurturing? Or are some more damaging than delightful? And most of all, what happens when female relationships go off the rails? And who is to blame? While falling in and out of romantic love is a well-documented experience, losing a friend rarely gets discussed. Which doesn't mean the pain is less – quite the opposite, as we discover in this extraordinary collection of heartfelt fiction and non-fiction works that put female friendship in the spotlight.

Nikki Gemmell looks at the hardwiring that keeps us bonded in tightly knit packs, but makes us feel oh-so-claustrophic in mothers groups and at the school gate. Melina Marchetta reveals the peculiar shame of being overlooked for the high-status netball positions of Centre and Goal Attack. Liz Byrski conducts a forensic examination of her own friendship history, and finds some uncomfortable patterns. And Merridy Eastman pens a letter from Helena to Hermia from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which shines the light on one of literature's most famously dysfunctional female friendships.

On the surface, a collection of fiction and nonfiction stories from nineteen different writers on the topic of ‘friendship’ sounds like it could be the stuff of a dull Year Nine English writing assignment. But it’s in the subtitle of 'Just Between Us' that the tension and purpose is revealed; ‘Australian writers tell the truth about female friendship.’ And then you only need read the foreword by Helen Garner to know that this is a very special book indeed, promising “a feast of things that women do not consider trivial.” Garner surmises; “that to examine with reverent attention the tiniest of human details is anything but a waste of time. It may even be essential to survival.” Indeed. 

This book is about the little things from which big things grow – the silences and missed phone calls, a crackle of tension in the air and a gaze averted. Some stories are funny, others confessional; many of the nonfiction authors, especially, try to offer condolences and answers to sunken friendships, while others are willing to let questions go unanswered and friends untethered. In this book nothing is too small, all is worthy of examination. From those friendships that drifted into the ether, to those cut short by death. All are examined with the same weight. In the introduction, the books' editors promised that this anthology would “escape the simplicity of those often-seen caricatures of female friendship: the effortless ‘best friends forever’ and the bitchy rival.” And they deliver. 

It’s often the end of a friendship that is examined in these stories. And Julienne van Loon inadvertently questions that in her nonfiction piece ‘In Broad Daylight’, about her last “real” female friend who lived a short, tragic life; 

It is curious that friendship is most often written about after it has gone, as if death legitimises the discussion of what was previously too private or fragile a territory. Are friendships between women particularly private and fragile?  

—‘In Broad Daylight’ by Julienne van Loon 

It’s often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and that seems never truer than in the case of female friendships. This anthology has six fiction and thirteen nonfiction pieces – and some of the true stories come from surprising authors. Cath Crowley and Cate Kennedy have decided to don truth over fiction for their pieces, with glorious results. Lots of the stories sting a bit, because there’s universal truth in them and the authors are laying bare some of their deepest regrets and bad behaviour, and it was in these pieces that I saw most of myself; 

I want to give you a reason but I can’t remember why I told. It wasn’t a mistake; I know that. I used your secret as a kind of currency but I can’t remember what it was I bought. 

— ‘A Letter to a Lost Friend’ by Cath Crowley 

Clementine Ford’s piece ‘Girls Who Wear Gingham’ rings especially, uncomfortably true for me. I went to a private all girl school. I wore gingham. To this day if I have a particularly nasty gossip session with my best friend from high school, we shrug at our petty nastiness and blame it on the school environment that bred it in us. 

There are girls who are never the victim, and there are girls who will always find themselves in that role. But in between, there are girls who pulsate between the two. So it was with me. I was the mouse. Sometimes I was the cat.

— ‘Girls Who Wear Gingham’ by Clementine Ford 

Other authors make delicious breadcrumbs of their stories, like Melina Marchetta’s ‘The Centre’, which is written entirely in epistolary email format between old high school friends rehashing an old debate over netball hierarchy … but which eventually reveals deeper hurts in one of their own, called Matilda. Even if I didn’t know (having heard Melina speak at a Penguin teachers function) that this was the beginning/trigger of a new book she’s working on (two words: Jimmy Hailer) I would want to follow wherever this story leads. 

Sexuality and romance is also beautifully explored in some of these stories; it’s all part of the prism, and love often follows friendship. As the editors promised, there’s nothing cliché or deliberately titillating in such stories – unsurprisingly (to women, at least) there’s none of that ‘male gaze’ pillow-fighting during a sleepover stuff … it’s quieter in ‘Just Between Us’, runs deeper. 

Miriam Sved’s fictional ‘One True Thing’ is about a woman who finds a collection of short stories written by one of her old school friends; one story clearly borrows heavily from their girlhood, and the sexual overtones colour her own memories of their past and have her desperate to reconnect and get to the bottom of what was fact and what was fiction for both of them. Francesca Rendle-Short dissects and vivisects in the nonfiction ‘Glossus’, on her marriage that eventually crumbled, and the little loves she held for the female friends along the way until she found ‘My Beloved’: 

Memories are encoded in our bodies – the forgetting and remembering; they press and lift us into different shapes, change the colour of our skin. There is a kind of ecstasy thinking about what J gave me that night, I feel it in my bones: because she didn’t care what anyone thought, no matter who or what she was or wanted to be – which was none of anyone’s business anyway, she was quick to add. She kept holding my hand, kept dancing, and became even more provocative and free. She challenged them all to yell it again, to grow more furious than they already were. J was always very good with her voice. 

— ‘Glossus’ by Francesca Rendle-Short 

I would love it if Pan Macmillan Australia made another anthology, of Australian writers telling the truth about male friendships. Helen Garner’s foreword includes a conversation with a male friend about the break down of her female friendship, to which he replies “Blokes tend to shrug and barrel on through.” Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s oversimplified. I know that in reading ‘Just Between Us’ I felt a deep connection to all of the stories in some way, because they’re my story too – but I’d quite like to be surprised and learn something about male friendships that could also benefit from an anti-cliché short story anthology. 

Here is a book that explores the shifting tectonic plates and little earthquakes that make and break female friendships. It is equal parts beautiful and uncomfortable, true and elusive … I found a bit of myself in every single piece, and after I finished reading I instantly wanted to pass it on to my friends so that they too could find themselves within the pages.

5/5