Paula Fox: Borrowed Finery

By JANE WESTAWAY

Paula Fox's childhood was nomadic, and her memoir Borrowed Finery is a careful log of her physical and emotional wanderings. It has made Fox - with more than 20 books for children and half a dozen for adults to her credit - into a hot property at the splendidly unfashionable age of 79.

Born in 1923 to a callous young mother and an erratic father, she is passed from one adult to another like unwanted baggage. Decisive acts of cruelty are rare; what the small Fox suffers is an endless, numbing neglect.

That she survived at all must be in good part thanks to the man she calls Uncle Elwood, a Congregational minister with whom she lives for several years as an infant. He treats her with affection, respect and good humour, qualities conspicuously lacking in most of her other caregivers.

Her cold, glamorous mother Elsie, and hard-drinking screenwriter father Paul, make random, unsettling appearances. Though her father is generally - but far from always - amiable, her mother treats her at best as a stranger, at worst with frightening outbreaks of rage and contempt.

When they take her to live with them, Elsie ends up yelling at her husband, "Either she goes or I go," and the child is packed off to yet another stranger. She lives in New York, Cuba, Florida, Nantucket and Montreal, each stretch punctuated by discomforting parental interludes, until at the age of 18 she is sent to Hollywood with an alcoholic friend, and soon makes an unsuitable marriage.

To say that Fox tells her story plainly and well is somewhat misleading. She writes a good sentence but seems determined to prevent them all adding up to a story. What we get is a scrupulous string of observations, events and details.

Fox never judges and rarely analyses what happened, or failed to happen, to her. Although she might have been eager to avoid the excesses of the I-was-a-badly-treated-child memoir, in Borrowed Finery she gives the reader too little.

Only in the last chapter - where she visits 92-year-old Elsie whom she hasn't seen for nearly 40 years, and meets the daughter she gave up for adoption at 21 - does she let the emotional impact of events come through.

So repelled is she by her mother that she cannot use her toilet but goes outside and finds a tree. Back in the airport restaurant, noticing the waitress and customers, she says, "I was surrounded by the saints of ordinary life, and for an instant I felt that God was in the restaurant. After Elsie".

It comes as a profound relief to finally meet Fox on the page like this. Memories mean little unless strung like beads on the consciousness of the writer. And it is the writer the memoir reader is looking for. Closing this book, I was left with the chilling feeling that Fox had somehow made herself absent - exactly as her dreadful mother had wished.

* Flamingo, $39.95

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.