Dear Reader, the image above is of one slightly congested but delighted writer who has just signed the contract for How To Avoid A Happy Life in the very apt environs of Rabble Books and Games in Maylands.
The idea of having someone in Australia read the manuscript was, quite frankly, nerve-wracking. (My dear mentor Howard Norman is at a comfortable distance in the US, and also, like any midwife, and used to seeing all the messy bits along the way).
The manuscript is very long, longer than my PhD was, and I feared it might be A Bit Much. To be fair, living it has been A Bit Much too, at times, so I would have had sympathy had that been the response.
Happily, that was very much not the response.
Happily, I got a Friday afternoon call from publisher Georgia Richter at Fremantle Press, which was the dream of every writer.
Happily, the contract is signed and countersigned, and will be toasted by me with alcohol free something or other during the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival, where I am shortly off to.
I’ve already started on the acknowledgements, to thank the people who got me through the living of the life as well as the writing of the book, even though it won’t be out until some time next year.
And among these are you, readers of this blog. Thanks for sharing the journey thus far, and I’m unutterably relieved that we will be able to continue it.
Dear Reader, thank you for your support and interest in How to Avoid A Happy Life over the course of 2022.
Part of the reason I started this blog was because I was not entirely sure I’d have the wherewithal to finish it, and I thought writing here might keep me accountable, as they say.
Howard Norman has also kept me accountable: as I’ve said before, I wouldn’t be where I am without his expert guidance.
While I wait for edits to arrive through the vagaries of the international post system, I’ve been faffing about, publishing stories on Medium – I’d love it if you would follow me there.
If you’re interested in joining me in some writing-related reflections (and a writing prompt challenge), join me here.
It’s also full of random pictures, which I’ve used because I only post stock ones I’ve paid for. So you might end up with a random picture of me with a baby wombat, apropos of nothing.
All the best to you and yours for the season, and may the New Year be good to you, and bring you peace, love and all the good things.
And for me, hopefully there will be more memoir news to share.
Dear Reader, if reflections on writing are not your bag, stay tuned for another installment of the memoir, coming soon. Also, TW below: suicidal ideation.
Writing a memoir is not for the faint of heart. People often joke about putting things in their memoirs, or of what they’ll write when they retire etc, but the strange combination of detachment and unflinching honesty which is required to write a memoir requires fortitude and therapy in roughly equal amounts.
To taste the sea, all one needs is one gulp.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My mentor Howard Norman asked me why I had applied to him for help. I’ve published more than a dozen novels and understand, obviously, the discipline required to write (and to deal with the vagaries of publishing, which is a whole other matter). I understand, I hope, structure and pace and developing characters. But writing fiction, even if autobiographically inspired, is a different beast to a memoir. A memoir is not a history, and, as Howard Norman reminded me, it requires many of the same elements of fiction writing. But the intersection with Others, and the need to understand and describe your own responses and reactions, are two things not required by fiction, and which I need to get a handle on.
I have a tendency toward the dense and the summary, for example, which means that I need to go back and develop further. For example, I began one of my chapters with ‘I celebrated my sixteenth birthday by deciding it was time to kill myself’. I give a brief overview of the factors that led to this, but it needs more than a flippant faux-dramatic sentence. Similarly I mention finishing my PhD at the same time as another event happening: apparently I need to explain a bit about my compulsion to study and how I have managed it among the unfolding chaos. Howard says: slow down. Explain.
Which brings me to the Other People problem. I have not included very much about my daughter’s growing up with a father developing Alzheimer’s, as well as having been otherwise difficult, because I don’t want to describe her experience. But in memoir, it is important to give the full picture of your main characters. I need to explain how I thought she was coping with things. So it’s tricky.
And then there’s defamation. There are some things I know I will not be able to publish, but I need to write my perspective of what happened and edit later. Legal Aid gives a handy guide to defamation in Western Australia which I have by my computer:
If someone causes harm to your reputation by publishing material about you that changes the way people feel about you, you may have been harmed in a legal sense. Not all offensive, embarrassing or upsetting remarks cause harm to your reputation.
Defamation is when words have been spoken or written which:
harm your reputation in the eyes of ordinary people in the community,
harm your reputation in your trade or profession (for example, lead you to get less work), or
are likely to result in you being shunned, avoided, made fun of, or despised.
A claim for defamation is a complex, time consuming and expensive legal matter.
The law in Western Australia encourages people to resolve disputes about defamation without going to court. Even if defamation is proven, it does not mean the court will award you much or anything in damages.
Fortunately for memoir-istas everywhere there’s also this: Things like gossip or embarrassing stories are unpleasant, but do not amount to defamation unless they cause the required harm to your reputation.
So, I need to test to make sure that I don’t include that kind of material. (Luckily you can’t defame the dead, so some of it will be fine!)
The process of writing continues to be a joy, a puzzle, a privilege. I am grateful to have this time to be doing it, and if you’re considering doing it to, investing in a mentor might just be the thing you need.
So far, I am arranging the memoir under these chapter headings:
Get Yourself Born into Intergenerational Misery
Experience Vicarious Trauma through Your Friend Being Raped and Murdered by a Japanese Serial Killer
Marry Your Ex-Girlfriend’s Brother
Surprise! Mr Hyde in Suburbia
Find Out Why Your Husband is Urinating in the Kitchen of an Evening
Find Yourself and Your New Partner Being Chased Down the Street by a Phalanx of Reporters
You’ll note, dear Reader, what I was referring to vis-a-vis the dose of irony. But despite that, I am deeply serious about the writing, and of honouring the people I have encountered along the way. This is no small matter. Reflecting on my life in this corner of the world, there is almost as much that I can’t write about – or can’t do justice to – as that which lends itself to shaping through language.
I am reflecting on this in particular because I am in the midst of losing a dear friend: by in the midst of, I mean at any moment. I do not know how I would include her in the above, although she has been there for most of it. Maybe I will yet find a way.
I recognise that the desire to record is also a talisman against the void beyond being. And because Walt Whitman was right: What invigorates life invigorates death.
Even if we understand that dying is the token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it — a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime — this understanding blurs into an anxious disembodied abstraction as the body slouches toward dissolution. Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp a timeless and infinite inanimacy — a void beyond being.
How to Avoid a Happy Life 
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