Staying: A Memoir, by Jessie Cole: triumph of life over darkness

This lovely, sad, luminous memoir meets the challenge of holding the brokenness grief ­creates without becoming broken oneself.

Author Jessie Cole.

Grief is to literature what scrimshaw is to ivory: scrollwork whose deep grooves exist as a kind of counter-pressure to the hardness of the ­material being worked upon. The desire to commemorate the dead is (for those possessed of the moral talent for proper grieving) in inverse proportion to the chasm that has opened between living and ­departed. The writer needs to press all the harder to reanimate those who have gone, to ­summon them back to life through the agency of memory and ­imagination.

The most cleanly etched lines are those that will never be read by the subjects who inspired them. A useful sorrow­, then, turning loss into words — Tennyson called it “sad mechanic exercise’’, as though the effort was a kind of health kick — but paradoxical in that the effort heals while ­reopening the scars of the bereft.

Jessie Cole is a considerable younger Australian author. Her two novels to date have written place, specifically the emerald back blocks of north coast NSW, with an intent and loving eye. She has a sure sense for the ways in which families contain the potential for ­damage as well as love, and a gothic eye for the intimate calamity strangers may visit upon closed domestic groups. She has built a promising career as an analyst of the nuclear clan in all its virtue and strangeness, secrets and frailties.

Staying is a memoir that illuminates the ­tensions and connections that have supported this creative effort. It is the motherboard from which Cole’s fictional routines have been generated and run. And it opens, harrowingly enough, with the description of her father’s death by suicide:

The Car hums. It is parked in the garage. The forest ticks around it — the cracking of branches, the hum of crickets, the light swish of leaves as they fall down from the trees. The spiders scuttle about repairing their webs. A possum shrieks off in the distance. The stray ginger cat haunts the periphery.

“But inside the car,’’ she continues, “my ­father is breathless.’’ This act is not surprising to the family — Cole’s father has been unbalanced, manic, distraught for an exhausting amount of time — but it is a detonation with ­effects that will be felt strongly and extensively by those left ­behind.

The mainstay of Cole’s existence has been ­removed. It will leave her ­unmoored and ­undone. It will shape her life for years, a life ­fuelled by the negative energy of her father’s act. It should also shape the narrative of the story she has to tell.

Yet that story is not subsumed by sadness. Cole’s loss is the backing of a mirror in which life and love are reflected in a dedicated ­refusal of despair. Immediately after the terrible events of the opening chapter, she ­circles back to her early life: an account of the beautiful, productive garden her parents carved out of the forest near the small town of Burringbar, and recollections of a warm, loving, near-feral childhood of sun and sand and the easy sociability of the historical moment.

It is a true hippie upbringing, in other words. Cole’s father was a psychiatrist who left Sydney with his wife and family in the late 1970s, wanting to live close to nature and discard the trad­itional strictures of his middle-class upbringing.

Cole is very good on the innocent idealism of this effort. She writes plangently of the effort and care her parents put into dropping out.

She also writes with Joan Didion’s barely submerged­ anxiety about the ways in which the utopian promise of the Age of Aquarius curdled. As the 70s turned into the 80s, and the family’s principled withdrawal from the everyday world turned into something wilder and more chaotic, a new arrival changed the household dynamic. This was Zoe, Cole’s stepsister and five years her senior, the child of her father’s first marriage.

Zoe brings a certain teen glamour to the Coles, but is not an easy half-sister to have. She is feisty, smart, and critical of the young Jessie. Cole adores her but hates her, too. Zoe soon ­displaces her sister and reconstitutes the family around herself and her dramas. When Zoe’s older sister Billie decides she too wants to join the Burringbar family, the domestic nucleus is broken apart and reconfigured once again.

It is Zoe’s suicide in Holland after she leaves school that first tears the family apart. Her ­father, who has spent years dealing with the death wishes of his patients, cannot assimilate the news of his own daughter’s loss. It drives him to madness. The most poignant and ­difficult portions of Cole’s memoir are those that deal with the manias this tragedy ­inspires: the arduous, shameful business of her beloved ­father’s decline:

My father had always been a social drinker, but after Zoe died his drinking changed. Halfway through his first bottle my father’s face started to transform. His skin reddened and his eyebrows protruded. His eyes behind round glasses became milkier and his cheeks more jowly. His voice turned harsh and soon it would begin. My father talked and talked, an angry monologue of grief, until one after the other Jake and I got up from the table and quietly left.

“It was as though our father had been infected with rage,’’ Cole concludes, “and he couldn’t shake it.’’ The years that follow are a litany of wrong turns. Cole’s father dies by his own hand, trapped inside his unhappiness, and the author is obliged to form her own family. She has children young, with a boy she loves for no better reason than he has been in her life forever. She anxiously audits her relationships with gentle brother Jake, high-powered sister Billie, and her loving if distant mother. But she can no longer make the remaining pieces of her family cohere.

It is no spoiler to say that it is words that save her. This memoir is the register of Cole’s grief, her years of damage, and also an account of the saving grace of writing. Becoming an ­author is a difficult therapy — it cures nothing, it forces the writer to swim deeper into their own hurt; however, what it can do is offer a space in which endings may be made sense of. Narrative has an itch for the sorts of resolutions real life stubbornly fails to supply.

All of which makes Staying sound grimmer than it is. This is a book buoyant with a love for family and the natural world. It pages are filled with light: the vividness of the living being who wants to live. What cannot be separated from these transports of contentment, though, is an irrefutable darkness. Cole’s innermost self is braided with loss.

Staying is the story of Cole’s revival. It is a ­literary achievement, but always a human story. Its message is that life has a tenacious power to draw us out of states of bereavement that, if surrendered to, have the capacity to destroy us ­entirely. Yet this very ability may also confirm in us a callousness — perhaps our feelings were not so strong after all. Getting better makes us feel as if we failed some essential test of fidelity.

The challenge is the one Cole meets and betters­ in this lovely, sad, sometimes luminous memoir: to hold the brokenness that grief ­creates without becoming broken oneself. To find consolation in remaining unconsoled.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.

Staying: A Memoir

By Jessie Cole

Text, 288pp, $32.99