The Mirror Book is something new for acclaimed fiction writer and critic Charlotte Grimshaw: a candid memoir that interrogates love, loyalty and family narratives.
"I'd had a personal crisis," she says, "and had embarked on trying to find out why. I discovered there was a great deal about the family and myself that I hadn't confronted or understood. I started writing about it, inevitably."
The personal crisis was sparked by her husband leaving — a temporary separation but a shock that threatened to derail Grimshaw's life. She felt a "primitive terror of isolation" that drew her into the past, investigating why she had no female friends. "For decades I'd never confided in anyone," she says. "Now I realised I didn't have the energy to push all this aside and carry on. I needed someone to help me with this, for the first time.'
A reluctant Grimshaw was referred to a female psychologist, Dr Sanders. ("I can't talk to women," she complained, but persevered.) "The memoir," Grimshaw says, "was an attempt at a coherent, careful, reasonable presentation of my case, to the family and to readers. I would love it if the book could be helpful to people. I also hope it's interesting for literary reasons and tells an unusual family story."
The unusual family in question is the Stead family of Parnell – father Karl, mother Kay, and their three children. As C.K. Stead, Karl has a fearsome international reputation as a scholar, poet, critic and fiction writer. Kay, a former librarian, remains his first reader, central to a literary circle that once included Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame and Allen Curnow.
Karl has written three volumes of memoirs, the third coming next month. In the second, You Have A Lot to Lose, Karl described their family life as "a minimum of piety between us, tears but not too many, shouting but not too much, some songs, some recitations from memory, and endless jokes". This benign picture is not, Grimshaw notes, the whole story. There were often "harsh and chaotic" emotions at home, rows over Karl's infidelities, tension and silent treatment.
"I've read about our family and various of our experiences in Karl's fiction all my life," she says. "My father's autobiographies are very much about his writing life and what he wanted to present of his personal life. But so much is left out." Grimshaw wondered why there were only "a few quick, airbrushed references to us. I was interested in that very lack of detail. Was he protecting our privacy? Or were we simply irrelevant to what mattered: his literary life?"
Stead and Grimshaw were close when she was young; he "pushed education", she says. Kay, by contrast, denounced teachers as conformists and delighted in her daughter's rebellion and eventual expulsion from school. The teenage Grimshaw was permitted to run wild, stay out all night, sleep rough and get nabbed by the police, numerous times, for petty crimes — without any parental disapproval.
"Yes, it was strange," says Grimshaw. "I love my parents and would do anything for them, but it has to be said there were some mysterious aspects to my youth, including no safety barriers. The opposite, in fact." Despite her expulsion, Grimshaw went on to study English and law at the University of Auckland. "I think education saved me."
When Grimshaw started publishing fiction, "people used to ask me, 'How do you come up with these plots?' They thought I was a crime writer and very plot-driven but, in fact, I was using details from my own life. It was just that my life included some wild details."
Early in life she was cast in the family role of difficult child. Her mother said, "There's something bad in you," and this "stuck in my mind", Grimshaw says, "because it produced despair. I think now that the despair was caused by a lack of empathy. I've always felt I had an instinctive insight into why some teenagers damage themselves—despair caused by not being heard and understood."
In her adolescence, Grimshaw was so silent that a teacher accused her of "dumb insolence" when "I was actually expressing some kind of mute desperation". Writing fiction was a liberation. "I could interpret the world, invent stories and work on the greatest puzzle: why people do the things they do."
For both father and daughter, fiction was the chosen sphere. Life was "material, my parents would say", Grimshaw notes in The Mirror Book. "Go and write a story about it." A story, not a memoir. "The prevailing family mode is that it's all right to inspect these experiences and ideas, but through the fictional filter. Every time I tried to get into memories and family history, there was silence, because I shouldn't be talking about these things." Her father wrote in an email that she got "things wrong all the time". Both parents, she says, insisted that the "memories I had weren't real".
Despite "blowback from the family" while she was writing the book, Grimshaw persisted. "I set out to write something about myself, about my experiences of crisis and trying to get myself out of it. But the problem is, you can't write about yourself without relating your childhood. Then they think it's all about them."
Still, she argues, this is "not an angry book. It's a book about family, and love of family. It's a plea for empathy, the need to treat each other better."
In a recent interview, Karl suggested Grimshaw wait until he was dead to write her revisionist memoir. But she "wasn't inclined to obey the edict about when I could publish. At some point you get sick of being told what to do. And the book was partly an appeal for understanding and communication. There can't be any understanding once people are dead."
Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai) is a fiction writer and essayist, and the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
Reflections on a family ruled by the pen
The Mirror Book
by Charlotte Grimshaw
(Vintage, $38)
Reviewed by Rachael King
The Mirror Book is a fascinating portrait of not only the literary Stead family, but the writing process — how we magpie material, what we build from it. At whose expense? And where is the line between fact and fiction drawn? "I'd been inventing and writing stories since I was a child," Grimshaw writes. "When I decided to try something different, to write a true account of my life, I ran into a wall of fiction."
Her memoir was sparked by emotional loss: when her husband leaves her, Grimshaw realises she is alone, "outside myself, stuck at a distance while some other, the wronged wife, went about the business of reacting". This leads to an examination of her life and past trauma, a deep dive into her past and her family dynamics.
The book takes as its central motifs family mantras, often the ones used to make Grimshaw question her memory, or at worst, her reality. They circle around and around the book, very much in the same way thoughts circle around an insomniac brain in the dead of night. ("Haven't we all ... failed to turn off our mind when it's spinning on repeat?")
This is not a book written for our entertainment; not written to shock or edify us, though it does all of these things. Grimshaw creates a portrait of her parents — Kay and C.K. (Karl) Stead — in order to try to understand them, to "tell the story of our family, at least to myself, in order to save me. All my life Kay and Karl had been telling it, and now I didn't think it was accurate."
Kay does not come out well in the book, much like the mother in Grimshaw's 2018 novel, Mazarine. Her daughter tries to understand her but feels that her mother simply doesn't care for her, actively avoids her even. Grimshaw revisits childhood memories, looking for evidence, and finds a neglectful mother, who tries to frame traumatic events as triumphs to be celebrated or forgotten, not dwelt upon.
The writing is astounding, particularly in vivid set pieces of childhood incidents: in at least two of them Charlotte and her siblings are in mortal danger. And this is not a black-and-white book; Grimshaw is at once a loyal daughter and a furious one. Stead comes off as a gaslighting tyrant, who controls the narrative of the family story not only in his novels and memoirs, but also, with one eye on his archives, through the emails he sends her, trying to curate the real story for posterity. But she also describes aspects of their relationship, like their shared jokes, with great affection.
Grimshaw implies that there can't be "two versions of the truth", that the notion is positively Trumpian, but this reader disagrees. There are always different versions of events, depending on who is remembering them. It's just that the version that gets written down is usually the one that becomes the truth. The power lies with who wields the pen. And in the Steads' case, now there are two pens.
Rachael King is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer, and the co-director of WORD Christchurch. A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com on Wednesday, April 7.
