An ABC journos twofer

Storyteller by Zoe Daniel

I am a huge fan of both Zoe Daniel and Sheryle Bagewell. Zoe’s reports for Foreign Correspondent, Lateline, 7.30 Report and the ABC news as the South East Asia Correspondent were always so engaging and lively. However, what I really took away from this, as I do with everything I read in this memoir project, is the tiny glimpses of real life. I might not aspire to duck bombs from a mob in Bangkok, but I love that she describes one fleeting time, her disagreement with her mother in law over her career choices “journalism is not a profession that she particularly respects, and only recently has she taken an interest in my work... I accept that it's somewhere around the level of used-car salesman in her eyes”. You might be a Walkley Award winning journalist with a honourable and powerful position at the top of your field, but you’ll still have a mother in law.

My French Connection by Sheyrle Bagwell.

I also love hearing Sheryle as the financial correspondent for RN Breakfast, which as I described on Twitter some weeks ago as my AM Franphetamine. Radio is the best medium. I will say that Sheyrle’s book about France was not much more illuminating that others in the same genre I have read, including the Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham, which is probably my favourite of that expansive collection, and which sent me down a Google-spiral for the French argot Verlan, which I find fascinating. Sheyrle doesn’t talk about linguistics or mothers-in-law enough for my liking.

Both Zoe and Sheyrle, interestingly, seem to regard being in one’s early thirties as young. Young enough to pack up and move to a foreign land, or consider and then accept (Zoe) or reject (Sheyrle) the idea of having children. I suppose it’s my own way of justifying my life choice, but I just don’t think of early thirties as being that young. I was kind of done with both children (at least birthing them) and travel by that age. Is that wrong? I did all that stuff in my twenties. Maybe I should have done more? Can I still do more?

Bumper edition!

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl By Carrie Brownstein

I think I was either slightly too old, or Sleater-Kinney was slightly too obscure for me to have formed much of a view about Carrie Brownstein's band contemporaneously. By the time that she's talking about (late 90s) I had moved on, really, from Seattle grunge and was deeply into the Sydney band scene. Which of course was so heavily influence by Seattle, but had a very specific Australian pub rock and punk twist. I was also by that time able to more fully admit my love of actual pop music, and that I found the most low-fi and discordant of the grunge bands actually pretty hard to listen to. In any case, Carrie is most definitely a pioneer and legend of the scene, and Portlandia is so, so hilarious. Her family sounds messed up. Thank you Carrie Brownstein, for your gifts to the arts and your cool hair and makeup and for continuing a fine tradition of music.

An Education by Lynn Barber

This memoir was famously made into a movie with Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard about Lyn's years as a teenage girl seduced by a real-life conman. The movie only goes up to the first two or so chapters of the book, and the rest of the book is about her life at Oxford, and then long career in media and publishing. Lynn is quite clear that she spent her whole time at Oxford smoking pot, sleeping with fellow students (50, she reckons) and exaggerating bouts of ill health to pass with an aegrotat. She then casts herself as somewhat of a pioneering truth-teller, giving the people the nasty tabloid gossip that they want. That sounds like kind of a gross career to have to, to me, but she seems happy with it. Good for you, Lynn Barber.

Air Kiss and Tell by Charlotte Dawson

Ohhhhhhh, this book is so sad. This memoir was published in 2012; Charlotte Dawson killed herself with a drug overdose in February 2014. The book definitely details her life's ups and downs. The marriage to Scott Miller and the abortion she was pressured to have so as to avoid ruining his training preparation for the 2000 Olympics (a team he didn't make, in the end, due to his own drug use and personal problems) sounds like the worst. After that, she relocated to New Zealand while pursing defamation litigation against News Corp Australia that took seven years to settle in her favour. It seemed like she was treated awfully in NZ as a public persona. Throughout the writing she does maintain a cheerful attitude and a workhorse-like approach to her career, taking whatever came her way as  a D-list TV presenter and erstwhile 90s department store model. You cannot fault her willingness to work. There are obviously moments recast with her in the best light, including some very fake ANTM backstage dialogue about the arrest of her last boyfriend, a con-man developer. That event also gives rise to the funniest moment of the book, her response to a fellow air traveller, asked why she is crying on a  late night flight from Brisbane to Sydney, that her partner has just been arrested for millions of dollars’ worth of bank fraud, and so she has to go home to walk the dog. Ugh, Charlotte. Sorry people were so crap to you.

Journey from Venice by Ruth Cracknell

Ruth Cracknell, beloved Australian icon of stage and screen, had already written her official memoir- A Biased Memoir- before taking the eponymous journey to Venice, which she doe s with her husband, Eric Phillips, between engagements with the Sydney Theatre Company. On day two or three of the journey, he is admitted to hospital with an uncontrollably bloody nose, which then becomes a stroke, a cancer diagnosis, and a tortuous navigation to have him medically evacuated to Australia, where he dies a few weeks after arrival. The story is obviously hideous for her, and the B plot is how this city of Venice, at first so enticing and romantic with its complicated architecture and social hierarchy becomes a villain in the story. 

Despite being a memoir, she manages to make it not about her by referring to herself only ever as "Mrs Philipps". Hah. Only in a woman's memoir. On the flip side, there's a scene when two Australians, holidaying in Venice, recognise Ruth from tv and approach her to say hello. She blurts out to them the horrible story about her husband's illness, and how she's navigating this all alone and doesn't speak Italian. I bet those Aussies still tell that story.

This book foreshadows The Year of Magical Thinking in exploring the loss of a life's companion, and dealing with strangers- especially medical personnel- who just can't and don't understand it all. She, like, Joan Didion, gives voice to universal love and grief. It's lovely to have someone with such skills write it all down.