by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
REBELLIOUS DAUGHTERS
REBELLIOUS
DAUGHTERS
True stories from Australia’s finest female writers
EDITED BY
MARIA KATSONIS AND LEE KOFMAN
Rebellious Daughters edited by Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman
Published in 2016 by Ventura Press
[Wentworth Concepts Pty Ltd]
PO Box 780 Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia
www.venturapress.com.au
Copyright © Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Anyone that may have been overlooked may contact the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author/s: Katsonis, Maria, Kofman, Lee
Title: Rebellious Daughters
Subtitle: True stories from Australia’s finest female writers
ISBN 9781925183528 (Print edition)
ISBN 9781925183566 (Epub edition)
Cover and internal Design: Alissa Dinalo
Production: Jasmine Standfield
Typeset by Alissa Dinallo in 12.5/17 pt Minion Regular
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
‘Families fling us into intimacy, into shared odours, a whole sensual archive of warm water and bitter tonics, inherited underwear, the balm of another’s touch.’
MANDY SAYER
CONTENTS
Introduction
DAUGHTERS OF DEBATE
Marion Halligan
WUNDERMÄRCHEN: A RETELLING OF MY GRANDMOTHER
Krissy Kneen
PRESSING THE SEAMS
Leah Kaminsky
THE GOOD GIRL
Jamila Rizvi
ME, MY MOTHER AND SEXPO
Lee Kofman
JUST BE KIND
Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones
A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR (OR NOT)
Maria Katsonis
A MAN OF ONE’S OWN
Susan Wyndham
WHO OWNS MY STORY?
Rebecca Starford
LOOKING FOR HAPPINESS IN AUSTRALIA
Silvia Kwon
REBELLING TO CONFORM
Jo Case
THE PEACOCK HOUSE
Nicola Redhouse
NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS
Amra Pajalic
ESTRANGED
Caroline Baum
JOYRIDE
Michelle Law
RESISTING THE NIPPLE
Rochelle Siemienowicz
WHERE MOTHERS STOP AND DAUGHTERS START
Jane Caro
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Permissions and References
INTRODUCTION
What brings together a Russian-born Israeli-Australian author who one day decides to take her unsuspecting Orthodox Jewish mother to Sexpo and an unconventional Greek girl whose father locks her out of the house after her all night drinking marathons?
Writing, of course, and, more specifically, writing grounded in our personal experiences. Our memoirs were published within a few months of each other and deal with vastly different subjects – non-monogamy and mental illness. Yet, in some ways, they echo each other, as both explore how our conservative upbringings and subsequent rebellions have shaped our emotional landscapes and life choices. To this day, being a rebellious daughter continues to play a significant role in making us who we are, and fuels our writing too.
Even though our backgrounds may sound somewhat unusual, ours are hardly unique experiences. Rebellion against one’s parents – to test authority and assert independence – is terribly common, and for many decades has been seen as a milestone in growing up. But do all familial rebellions fit into the usual developmental (and relatively benign) model of a storm, which sets in during puberty then fades out as we enter so-called young adulthood? Our own lives show that rebellions can assume other shapes too. Maria’s peaked in her twenties, whereas Lee is still stuck in that rebellious stage. We wanted to find out what other writers can reveal about this supposedly universal life experience, which has been so formative for us.
We decided to focus on female experiences. To this day, the stereotypes of daughters as rather dutiful and obedient seem to endure, in contrast to sons who presumably sow their wild oats as a rite of passage. We wanted to hear the less-talked-about stories of daughters – stories of independence, stories of breaking away from familial continents to assert the Self. So with the blessing of our publisher, Jane Curry from Ventura Press, we invited other Australian women writers to explore their experiences.
Family is often said to be a microcosm of the human condition, and the human condition is not always a nice one. Ordinary suburban houses can become the grounds for epic battles and Medici court-style intrigues. Uprising against one’s parents, then, is potent material for literature. Think Electra or King Lear. But you can also say that Euripides and Shakespeare had it relatively easy. After all, their rebellious daughters originated from myth and private imagination. To record fractures in relationships with our families is a riskier endeavour, frequently with real-life consequences. As Rebecca Starford argues in this book, women memoirists often don’t even feel like they own their stories; daughters are not supposed to wash their dirty laundry in public (at home, though, they are always welcome). This resonates. We, too, struggled with the questions of ownership, loyalty and the potential hurt to our families while writing our memoirs.
Since one can rarely tell a truthful story about difficulties with one’s nearest and dearest without getting into trouble, writing about our parents is not for the faint-hearted. But then, possibly the best thing that a writer can do, at least according to the legendary editor Gordon Lish, is to ‘get oneself in trouble, make it hot for yourself ’. When writers take risks, the artwork usually shines. With Lish in mind, we wanted a risky book and our contributors took up the challenge.
Our quest for contributions for this anthology reaped a diverse harvest of stories from Chinese, Greek, Korean, Australian, Indian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, straight, gay, older and younger rebellious daughters. Some are writers of fiction or creative nonfiction, others stray across genres, including poetry and journalism. Despite the differences in authors’ backgrounds, we found a similar artistic vision reverberating through their works in the sense that they each offer an inquisitive, unsentimental examination of what our families mean to us; how these relationships can be profoundly prey to ambivalent feelings, volatility and even violence; and of the price we sometimes pay for familial love. Their memoirs don’t resort to the easy, redemption-style resolutions one comes to expect in more clichéd examples of this genre, but rather describe familial conflicts as they are – often messy, sometimes insoluble. And while our contributors don’t shy away from placing their families under the writerly microscope, there is no shortage of empathy in their tales either. After all, the rebellious daughters in this book often hold themselves up to the greatest scrutiny.
Taken together, the stories here form a complicated map of parent-daughter relationships, showcasing the variety of pathways these can form. For many daughters, the act of rebelling helps them forge their identities. However sometimes, as stories by Susan Wyndham and Jo Case demonstrate, rebelling agains
t one’s parents may set us on a problematic course, and even take us further away from our authentic selves. Rebellion exacts a price and, for some contributors, this has included family estrangement.
Some writers had more to rebel against than others as they struggled with stifling expectations embedded in their religious or otherwise conservative upbringings and these provided fertile ground for their rebellious escapades. Sometimes it is the worlds their parents inhabit that the daughters rebel against, such as the world of mental illness or addiction, or of migrants clinging to the ways of old.
Many of the stories here are also stories of love. Or sex. Or both. Perhaps this is because female sexuality has always been considered a dangerous, wild territory which it is parental duty to tame. Rebellious daughters, though, insist on fulfilling their sexual longings. They lose their virginity against their family’s wishes, like Krissy Kneen; run away with boys, and later with men, as Leah Kaminsky recounts; love girls rather than boys, like Starford; or they rebel by marrying too young as in the cases of Wyndham and Rochelle Siemienowicz.
Rebellion can be rooted in appearance – a disdain for pink clothing, a number 2 buzzcut, excessive quantities of kohl, a predilection for midriff tops. For some, the company they keep epitomises their rebellion: Amra Pajalic hangs out with the wrong crowd in seedy nightclubs while Case gets entangled with the renegades at school. Silvia Kwon rebels by moving out of her parents’ traditional home, and ceasing to act as their translator and ‘bureaucratic caretaker’.
Occasionally daughters play tricks on their parents, like Nicola Redhouse who taunts her mother by staying out all night and leaving her handbag on the doorstep for her to discover in the morning. Sometimes they fight overtly, trading verbal blows. Even more often, they run away, putting sweeping emotional and physical distances between themselves and their parents – sometimes even whole continents. And they refuse to be cast in their parents’ identities: wear the mantle of the good Greek girl, be the pastor’s kid or the tailor’s daughter. For Michelle Law, the act of rebellion can be as apparently unremarkable as a bike ride, yet for her that ride epitomised the freedom that she craved. Writing too can become, or at least be viewed, as a rebellion, as Starford discusses in her account of the consequences of publishing her memoir.
While some writers don’t see themselves as rebellious, they evoke with admiration the rebellions of others. Marion Halligan writes with wry affection about her sisters who rebelled in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, a time in Australia when few daughters dared to do so openly. Jamila Rizvi, who describes herself as embodying the expression ‘good girl’, lives out her rebellion vicariously through her baby sister’s exhilarating naughtiness. Whereas Jane Caro, as a mother, had to contend with not one but two rebellious daughters, and also with two very different types of rebellion – one full of drama and intensity, the other of withdrawal and oppressive silences. Nevertheless, Caro writes: ‘These days I am proud of my rebellious daughters. I am proud of the courage both of them displayed when they insisted on showing me where I stopped and they started.’
Indeed, the entanglement between mothers and daughters can be mighty. Mothers have the habit of haunting us throughout our lives. Marguerite Duras said it better when she wrote: ‘Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met’. So it is no surprise that many of the rebellions recounted here are enacted specifically against mothers. For some contributors, becoming mothers themselves made them understand their own mothers more, to finally see them as separate individuals with yearnings and sorrows of their own. For Siemienowicz, less expectedly perhaps, motherhood opened a new space for rebellion as she grew determined to mould herself into a different kind of mother from the one she’d had.
Still, there are quite a few fathers and even stepfathers here who evoke their daughters’ rebellious instincts, as in Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones’s account of her uneasy relationship with her alcohol and prescription medication addicted father. In this story, as in that of Kneen, grandmothers too loom as these ‘strangest, craziest’, larger-than-life figures against whom we must rise.
‘Time blunts the sharpness of resentment,’ writes Caroline Baum. The passage of time is important in her memoir and not just because it played a role in her reconciliation with her parents, but also because only in her 40s did Baum come to think of herself ‘less as a daughter’ and develop a more diverse range of identities. Indeed, judging by our contributors’ accounts, timelines of rebellion vary vastly. While Baum is a late bloomer, some daughters begin as early as babyhood – rejecting their mother’s breast, wriggling in resistance on the changing table. And for others, being a rebel becomes an ongoing project, a permanent marker of Self. Regardless of different timings, what arises from all stories is how powerfully familial rebellions linger in our psyches, often becoming our ‘origin myths’, to borrow Siemienowicz’s words.
Lee and Maria
DAUGHTERS OF DEBATE
MARION HALLIGAN
‘The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow.’ Spoken by Elizabeth 1 of Mary Queen of Scots
I have in my garden, leaning against an oak tree, a concrete tablet. My father made it when he was constructing the paths marking the garden beds in our new house not far from the sea, where he dug the sand out to two spades depths and filled it with good soil so he could grow vegetables. The tablet is about twenty centimetres square, and incised into it are three rows of initials: AJC, MAC, MMC. My father, my mother, me. I was two. I suppose he used up a left-over chunk of concrete. It hung about our back garden for more than 40 years, and when my mother died and we sold the house, I kept it and brought it to Canberra.
This may seem a funny little narrative, and quite trivial. But I find it very moving. I see in it my father’s pride in his little family, his delight in it, his tracing out our names for some sort of posterity. Perhaps his relief that this had happened at all. I didn’t find out until the eve of his funeral that my mother wasn’t his first wife. He had proposed to her when they were both young, but she thought him high-toned and arrogant, and his family snobbish, so she refused him. He married a woman called Thelma. Oh, we knew of Thelma, but thought she was just an old girlfriend, sent away when he met up with my mother again. I used to wear a silk evening scarf that I knew she’d made him, not nearly so well as my mother would have knitted it. But not till after his death did we learn that he had married her, and that she died of consumption some six months later. My mother said that he had known of the disease, had thought he could cure her, and was heart-broken when he failed. He fled away up north, and it was some years before he came back and courted my mother again. This time she said yes; he was probably less arrogant, and she was keeping house for her parents and various unmarried siblings, while my grandmother sat and embroidered. I suspect she thought she might as well be keeping her own house instead.
Hence my father’s pride in something he must have thought might not happen. He was 36 when I was born, old for those days, and I was 36 when he died. These are numbers of some neatness but absolutely no significance. I knew how much he loved me. He would lie on the couch with me and read the Sunday paper. Once I asked him about what was going on in the political cartoon, and he said it was a picture with a double meaning. I climbed over him to look at the other side of the paper, to see the double meaning. He was patient with all this scrambling. There is a picture of my fifth birthday party. We are all wearing spectacular crepe paper hats, mine is a sunrise, which I think would have been made by my aunt the milliner. We are standing surrounded by my presents; there’s a big blackboard, with a picture of a sailing ship on it. A wheelbarrow. A doll’s cupboard. A small table and chairs. All made out of wood and painted by my father. Hours of work.
By this time, my sister was born. And then several years later another sister. My father was a rather patriarchal man, and would have liked a son. But I don’t think he ever made any of his daughters think she should have been a boy. He liked having all these daughter
s, even though he also quite enjoyed grumbling about everlastingly being surrounded by women. His sister would have liked there to be a boy, too, in order to carry on the family name. When I had a boy, she said I should give him my surname as a middle name. I was appalled by that. I was delighted to give up my so-called maiden name. Halligan was the name of my husband, and it was so wonderful to be able to say it and people could hear you and would know how to spell it. My own name you had to repeat over and over and people still didn’t get it, and they couldn’t hear the spelling either. This name was Crothall. That same aunt, who was a fierce spinster hospital matron, had a way of communicating it to people. She’d say, Crothall, and when they looked at her cross-eyed, she’d rap out: rhymes with brothel.
I was 23 when I got married. There was no way, in the polite world I lived in, that I could possibly have said this word. And there was no way I was going to lumber my beautiful new little boy with this difficult name. And anyway my father didn’t pronounce it to rhyme with brothel, he said it with a slight emphasis on the ‘all’, especially I reckon to avoid the connection.
Decades later, in the days when I was a Penguin author, we went to a Penguin party at a boutique brewery in Sydney, and somebody said to my husband, You’re Marion’s husband, aren’t you. What’s your name? Graham said, Oh my name’s Halligan too. I took her name when we got married. He said this so perfectly deadpan that he made the questioner nervous, not having any idea whether he was joking or not.
I was a good girl, a virtuous daughter, dutiful. I mostly behaved well, and my parents knew it. I pleased them. Though sometimes the situation was morally somewhat ambiguous. One day, when I was in my teens (teenagers hadn’t been invented but you could be in your teens) I brought home a book from the library. I had just graduated from the children’s library to the adult; you grew out of one and automatically into the other. Another thing that hadn’t been invented then was young adult fiction.