Catherine Taylor’s book is less a memoir than it is a literary study of a kind of splitting. Throughout her account of a life growing up as a girl – in New Zealand and the UK – at a time when to be one seemed particularly fraught with heterosexually charged dangers and lusts, she slices into her narrative and changes it, shifts it from being one sort of story into another. “To start at the beginning, or at a beginning. The hourglass of our family had a few grains of sand left in it … The white sands of Mull … the black volcanic sands of New Zealand … Nothing could be known.”
Born in Waikato in the late 60s, Taylor can’t help but place the effect of that history in the very heart of her narrative – and its result is to feel that one is not so much reading an autobiography as experiencing a constant flicker of light and dark, of here and there, of secrets and secrets shown. It’s as though the country Taylor came from keeps turning off and on its light, casting bright shadows everywhere she looks, causing a single scene to be cut right down through its middle to show both of its hemispheres. “The hot sun, the Pacific light … the air now chilly and smoky … We had travelled all the way across the world.”
The Stirrings opens with a line from the German poet Christa Wolf: “The paths we really took are overlaid with paths we did not take …”, and so from the beginning we feel this writer to be fixing upon her text a perspective that looks back to her childhood and adolescence using the forward propulsion of her future as a journalist and writer.
Taylor is a regular contributor to magazines such as Granta and newspapers including the Guardian and the Financial Times, and is also a publisher and editor. Her literary self-consciousness is acute. This “autobiography”, she writes, is “entirely from my own perspective” – so allowing for its intensities to be underlined and knowing references to the outside world to be skilfully internalised.
When asked to write a newsletter about her New Zealand experiences for chums back in England, the schoolgirl Catherine resists. “New Zealand was mine not theirs,” she tells us, before going on to detail a series of impressions and scenes that live vividly within her memory and on the page. The precision of her language keeps her secrets safe and displays them flagrantly to the reader in equal measure. It’s a sly and delicious peepshow of a narrative.
The prologue to The Stirrings is set in a cemetery in the dusky evening light of Sheffield: a bunch of young teenage girls are scaring themselves sick by being out at a time when they know the Yorkshire Ripper, the infamous serial killer, could strike at any moment. “The electric terror sparked and magnified each time he strikes towns and cities across Yorkshire …” A recent murder adds to the frisson: “We are thirteen: a glittering dangerous age. We are not supposed to be out,” Taylor writes. A new name has been added to the list of the Ripper’s victims – and it is to the credit of her gripping and volatile text that we find ourselves double-checking that she herself has not counted as one of the names on that list. “It was in early May … I was in hospital. Tomorrow I would be having my throat cut,” she tells us provocatively on page 157. Of course, we have the book in our hands as proof that Catherine Taylor is no victim; we’re halfway through it when we read that line. Still, the slice of the blade feels ever close.
For sure, men stalk the pages of The Stirrings whether or not they are a murderer. Father, boyfriend, doctor, all seem to carry weapons of one kind or another. Whether it’s the threat wielded by a remote parent who finally leaves his family, “the dark apparatus of the state” put to work by security services and the police force, or the speculum thrust between her legs by an abortionist, Taylor works carefully to ensure her prose wreaks havoc with our sense of narrative expectation. Comic moments sit within them. The bloody “things came unstuck when my period began unexpectedly”, she jokes, before detailing the fashioning of a “panicky rudimentary pad out of toilet paper” so the new boyfriend need not know. It’s only at the end of a long week that “I finally disposed of the acrid-smelling, bloodstained waste”, acknowledging at the same moment, with the evidence fully covered up, that the whole escapade has been a grand success. Despite all, “A boy is holding my hand …” The bloody, then, can also be a bloody good joke: “I could hardly breathe for happiness,” she writes. “I was smiling with achievement.” There’s no “closure”, ever, in such an account of a life lived. Emotions are raw. The wounds are open. Even when an operation goes wrong and she might have died – “I very nearly didn’t make it back … I was lying on what I first took to be a mortuary slab” – still, you can only grin and bear it.
In the end, then, this marvellous book is a creature of itself. Memoir? Forget it. Here is prose operating at the level of a lethal instrument. To be a girl, Taylor shows us, is to be glittering and unstable and dangerous all at once; “the past is present”, she tells us. It is to know the Pacific sun on your back as well as the clammy flagstones of the cemetery at your feet. “I trip and fall heavily on my knees. My tights rip … The halcyon days are coming. I pick myself up and start to run.”
The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $44.99 hb).
