The blazing life, joy and dignity of novelist Gillian Mears

BIOGRAPHY: Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears, Bernadette Brennan, Allen & Unwin, $34.99

A biography offers a single version of a life, but like the great Australian writer Christina Stead before her, Gillian Mears knew life is lived in multiple ways, adrift on an ocean of stories. Mears lived her stories as deeply and richly as she could, often against great odds, as if she knew her time in the sea was fleeting.

Gillian Mears, seen here in 2015, owed everything to her beginnings.Credit: Anna Kucera

As Drusilla Modjeska has noted, at the heart of every biography is a paradox. The biographer’s task is unenviable: to reanimate a life lived in all its multiplicity and contingency to create a narrative whole. Fortunately for Mears, who died in 2016 after an adventurous life and garlanded literary career, the biographer Bernadette Brennan has done a masterful job in ferrying the reader to shore from the swell of stories.

If Mears’ extraordinary gift as a writer was to make manifest life’s beauty and cruelty – so that reading her is to be reminded of the poetics of existence in the physical world as well as the numinous mysteries beyond – Brennan’s gift is to render Mears unabridged, but still partial and contingent.

Gillian Mears found immediate success with The Mint Lawn, which won the Vogel award.Credit:

The short life of Gillian Mears – who loved life with a blazing joy but chose to die with dignity at 51 after years struggling with multiple sclerosis – is delivered to us in what might be called its full female embodiment, since sex and the body, and what it means to inhabit femaleness, was central to Mears as a writer and as a person. “So porous were the boundaries between her life and fiction that during the course of my research I often became confused,” admits Brennan at the outset.

This is gendered biography, far removed from the cool male remoteness of what Modjeska calls “Great-Man biographies”. Mears’ friend David Malouf told Brennan that “often the gap between the social person and the writing is great. In Gillian, it was very close” – and to Brennan’s credit she allows readers to appreciate the full complexity of this closeness.

Mears was of the generation of female Australian writers who came after Helen Garner (Brennan’s previous subject), and she found success from the start. Her first novel, The Mint Lawn, won The Vogel Award in 1991 and over the next 30 years her novels, stories and poetry won everything from Premier’s Literary Awards to Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes to the ALS Gold Medal.

Her third and final novel, Foal’s Bread, which won the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction (and the Age fiction book of the year), was written amid great physical, emotional and financial distress, since by then she was in a wheelchair and needed full-time care.

But what came later should not eclipse what came before. Brennan is superb at showing Mears in her folly and glory: needy, demanding, sometimes manipulative and ruthless, but also charismatic, seductive to both men and women, physically brave, a generous friend, a playful aunt, a passionate advocate for the natural world and its creatures (especially horses), equipped with a genius for living unbridled.

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For the ladies among us still faking orgasms, witness the un-ladylike Mears phoning her former husband to ask for his pleasuring techniques so she could pass his advice to a new lover she found sexually wanting. If that particular story doesn’t tell us something about Mears, perhaps the fact that her ex was willing to provide two pages of typed instructions, while her new lover was affronted but mainly impressed by her boldness, tells us more about her mesmerising attractions.

Or witness Mears taking off alone in a decommissioned ambulance for the wilds of the bush, or see her in physical extremis, her body half paralysed, crawling up a mountain in Venezuela in search of a miracle.

The remarkable writer and person that Gillian Mears became owes everything to her beginnings, and Brennan navigates her animating origin story with confidence. If Mears’ work has a certain gothic quality, it’s because her family and early life contained psychic dramas of Shakespearean proportions.

Her father was a grass scientist and her talented but unfulfilled mother a charismatic figure. Somehow the family – mother, father, Mears and her three sisters – became emotionally enmeshed, so that invariably one sister felt betrayed by another, or one sister wasn’t talking to another until hell froze over. When Mears was 15 her best friend was shot and killed by her own mother.

Plenty of material, eh? Except that the material was also her adored elder sister Yvonne’s material, a writer too (bad luck for her), and when Mears pinched part of Yvonne’s title (Grass Angels) for her own second novel (The Grass Sister), Yvonne was outraged.

There is plenty more on the ethics of writers creating books from lived experience, and unquestionably some of Mears’ friends, lovers and relatives felt aggrieved. Mears was a compulsive letter-writer and diarist – Brennan draws extensively from her enormous archive – and some felt betrayed after learning she had sold their letters to the State Library of New South Wales.

Brennan’s stories occasionally leave out other stories nestled inside. I was not an intimate friend of Mears, nor was I interviewed for this book, but I was invited to her last great party when she danced in her wheelchair, and which Brennan describes as an “unsettled” evening, partly because of concern over news of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine.

What Brennan leaves out is why Mears and other members of Australia’s literary community present that night were unsettled: word was filtering in that one of our number, Melbourne novelist Liam Davison, was on board.

What else has been left out? And doesn’t this illustrate the ambiguous nature of biography’s stories?

Brennan writes that one of her motivations in writing the book is her belief that Mears’ work deserves to be more widely celebrated and remembered. Her biography shows a remarkable duty of care towards Mears the woman and the writer, and should immediately plunge new readers into Mears’ unknowable sea.

Susan Johnson’s latest novel is From Where I Fell is published by Allen & Unwin.

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