The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  The images continue until the album concludes with one of my father and me. I look around seven, so he must be in his late thirties. The camera has captured our profiles as we face each other, our lips puckered as if going in for a kiss. He is holding me off the ground, my arms wrapped around his shoulder.

  Eight or ten years earlier, the three of us on the snow. Dad is seated at the back of a red toboggan, me folded between his legs on the front, Carlie squashed between our two torsos.

  Me pulling Carlie along on the snow.

  Carlie eating the snow.

  Dad bathing Lisa.

  Carlie and I tucked into the same single bed that Lisa would later use.

  But perhaps my favourite is this: Carlie and me on rollerblades, our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, the sides of our helmets smooshing into one another as we hold our heads close.

  And on they go: us three girls sprawled over Dad as he lay across the lounge room floor; Lisa’s face covered in chocolate cake; me dressed in someone’s scuba gear; Carlie upside down in a handstand; us girls dressed in the huge cardboard Easter-egg outfits that Dad made us for the school Easter parade; Lisa with her legs in the plaster she had to wear for several months to try to correct her hips; Carlie in pink sunglasses outside my grandparents’ house; Lisa naked and standing in the naughty corner again; me squatting while camping; Lisa peeking her head out of the dirty clothes basket, her tongue stuck out at the camera; me kissing Carlie when we are a few years older.

  Finally, I start to remember.

  Author’s Note

  When i began writing this book, I wanted to tell my story of those early years after the trauma of losing Carlie and Lisa. But, as happens with any creative form, the artist cannot always control the art and, along the way, I found myself unintentionally telling the story of my family, from my point of view. As with all memoir, the events in the preceding pages are not the only truth. That would be impossible. Memory is fallible and frequently, when I contacted people to confirm details, I found we remembered different things. While I made all possible attempts to verify facts and recollections, this book can only ever be one interpretation of them; I’m sure each of my parents has their own. It has never been my intention to hurt them or expose them. But ultimately, to tell my story, I must also tell part of theirs.

  When I started explaining to close friends and relatives what my book was about there were many suggestions about how to protect my parents.

  ‘Publish under a pseudonym,’ someone suggested.

  ‘Leave the sex-work stuff out,’ another friend said.

  This is what concerned me most: my parents were terrified of people finding out about my past, when what I was most nervous about was how intimate a portrayal of their private and grief-stricken lives the book had become.

  But I’m sick of people not talking about the hard, private things in their lives. It feels as though we are all walking around carrying dark bubbles of secrets in our guts, on our shoulders, in our jumpy minds. We are all walking around thinking we’re the only one struggling with these feelings. And the more I open up about them, the more I realise I am not the only one struggling with my secrets and my shame.

  ‘If you feel it, somebody else does too,’ a mentor once told me.

  It would have been easier for my parents had I decided not to publish this book. But I am hungry to heal, and starting to speak honestly to others about these things is the only way I know how. Furthermore, writing is the thing that gets me excited about each new day. And why write if you’re not going to write the hard stuff? Isn’t that the point of art?

  Publishing this book is about stepping out of my shame, to speak publicly. When this book was receiving offers, a line stayed with me from one of the pitch letters: ‘But this is not just a grief memoir. It is a universal plea for the expression of the deepest and most difficult of emotions . . .’

  You could not ask for better parents than the two I’ve been given. Over the years, I’ve not always treated my mother in a way that has reflected this. She’s had an exceptionally hard life, and yet through it all she has remained kind and optimistic. She still somehow finds joy in the world. She is the glue that holds our family together, and she and my father are the two people I admire most in the world. But we are very different people.

  The story in these pages is, in some ways, me trying to figure out how to have healthy adult relationships with these two people, within the context of our shared grief and vastly different world views.

  But as much as this book reveals part of their story, it is not their choice to publish it. As such, I ask that you respect my parents’ privacy. If you have questions to discuss and are within our family networks, please come to me, and not my parents, no matter how close to them you might be.

  And finally, I should note, I am writing to expel the ugly parts of myself. These are not the only parts of me, but they are the parts I’ve chosen to focus on in this book. Since that period of my life, I have begun to recover. I’ve now travelled to more than thirty countries. As a third-year undergrad student, I started Wollongong Writers Festival. Now, as the Director, I have watched it grow from a one-day, 25-artist, six-event project that ran on $300 of funding in its first year, to a stunning not-for-profit literary organisation that supports more than sixty artists, two part-time staff, five interns and twenty volunteers with state government funding to pull off thirty-five events per year. We’ve brought a diverse array of national and local artists together in this regional community, Skyped in artists from overseas, run various residency programs, helped local children develop a love of literature, built partnerships that have seen us work with some of the most vulnerable and under-represented people in the community. I’m halfway through a PhD. I have a multitude of close friendships with good people, and strong links to my family. Although I still struggle with my grief, I have, at least in part, come through it, too. I am learning to be kind and compassionate, and to find ways to support my curious and questioning sense of self, without it being at the expense of others.

  Chloe Higgins

  Wollongong, January 2, 2019

  Acknowledgements

  Mum and dad: Thank you for allowing me to work through our relationships the only way I know how. And for being the best goddamn humans I ever met. (Also, that humour.)

  To Joshua Lobb: For convincing me the early drafts of this book was not the domestic and mundane stuff I thought it was. You’ve been my first reader for nine years now; I’m not looking forward to writing without you. I am so grateful for your guidance. It’s been a privilege.

  Desney King: Who knew one conversation on a jacaranda-laced writers’ centre veranda could lead to this, a decade later? Also, for pointing out the title of this book.

  Hayley Scrivenor: For showing me what friendship is. Thank fuck for that very first discussion of commas; for that throwaway line you once said: ‘Should we continue this life-long conversation?’; for being my favourite person to squat beside while camping.

  Donna Waters, Helena Fox, Julie Keys: Fridays are my favourite because of you beautiful humans. Thank you for holding space for the things I previously could not say.

  Glenn Wanstall: I’m not sure you realise how much you shaped this book. Your early question: ‘But what about your mother?’, and then later, our headbutting about ‘listening’. This work would lack much without our ongoing discussions.

  Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis: For teaching me compassion and being gentle with me while I learn how to think.

  Sara Rich: Those evening chats stopped my head exploding each time I was on the edge of a panic attack.

  KSP: For reminding me memoir is a valid form.

  To my agent Jane Novak for believing in my work and bringing me to the brilliant team at Picador and Pan Macmillan.

  My publisher, Mathilda Imlah: Your editorial generosity made this book so much ric
her. My biggest concern when the manuscript was out on submission was finding the right editor, and you knocked my expectations out of the park. #besteditorever

  Thanks also to Georgia Douglas and copyeditor Emma Schwarcz. Your eagle eyes were much appreciated.

  Felicity Castagna: You astound me, and we are so lucky to have Finishing School. Thank you for everything you do to support and nurture emerging women writers in western Sydney. We adore you.

  Thanks also to those who have provided feedback, advice, or both: Dean Alcorn, Fiona Wright, Bradley Onishi, Kylie Grigg, Adam Norris, Nigel Featherstone and the Hardcopy team, Merlinda Bobis (those early words!), Mary Cunnane, Christine Howe, Lee Kofman, Stephen Samuel, and my Tuesday workshop group.

  Eda Günaydin and Faith Chaza: You make returning to western Sydney feel like home again. Thanks especially to Eda for your insightful and much appreciated edits.

  Donica Bettanin and Joseph Pearson: For your West Village apartment while I edited, and where part of this book is set. It is my editor’s favourite chapter.

  Thanks also to Graeme, Amelia and Seth: your support in this project is much appreciated.

  Thanks also to those who have provided funding, mentorship or residency time to work on my writing: the Finishing School Collective, WestWords Emerging Writers Fellowship, Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Emerging Writer-in-Residence, Shady Cosgrove and UOW’s CP3 Bundanon mini-residency, Australian Society of Author’s Varuna/Ray Koppe Young Writers’ Residency, The Writer’s Hotel (New York), the Arteles Creative Center (Finland), and the Create NSW Quick Response Grant. Thanks also to Glimmer Train and Feminartsy: those early awards helped convince me there might be something to this book after all. This book was written as part of a PhD in Creative Writing in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Wollongong, and would not have been possible without the funding received from the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. What a gift: time to slow down and learn how to see.

  Carlie and Lisa: I miss you.

  About Chloe Higgins

  Chloe Higgins writes about the things we’re all afraid of: death, sex, love, and how we feel about our mothers. Chloe is the Director of the Wollongong Writers Festival, a casual lecturer and tutor in creative writing at the University of Wollongong where she is completing a PhD, and a member of the Finishing School Collective. Originally from south-west Sydney, she now lives in Wollongong and travels the world for three months per year. The Girls, a memoir of family, grief and sexuality, is her debut.

  First published 2019 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © Chloe Higgins 2019

  The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781760788230

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group

  Quotation from ‘Doubtful Arms and Phantom Limbs: Literary Portrayals of Embodied Grief,’ by James Krasner, published in PMLA, vol. 119, no. 2, pp. 218–232. Used with permission from the Modern Language Association of America.

  Quotation from Dying: A Memoir © Cory Taylor,

  published by The Text Publishing Company.

  The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright

  holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may

  have been overlooked should contact the publisher.

  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this

  book may contain images or names of people now deceased.

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