Births Deaths and Marriages Georgia Blain
Vintage Australia $24.95
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By Anne Lin
In her latest book, Births Deaths and Marriages, Georgia Blain trades the fictional narrative of her earlier work for an honest memoir, set against the backdrop of Australian suburbia.
Dipping into the memories banked up over several decades, Blain skilfully interweaves anecdotes featuring her broadcaster feminist mother and mentally-ill elder brother. They spill freely and honestly, littered with moments of resonance: her rite of passage is marked at various points by family holidays, school encounters and clairvoyant consultations with her partner Andrew and daughter Odessa.
The pace of the book is measured and deliberate, like a nice afternoon of free flowing conversation with a cup of tea. Each chapter deals with a separate topic and reads like a confessional therapy session, touching on couple counselling, pregnancy, pets and failure to fit in.
Blain examines the idiosyncrasies of her family, effectively reopening old wounds in the process. She forces herself into confronting things she was once too shy to face up to, poring over raw moments, like her inability to grieve the day her schizophrenic brother fatally overdosed. She's equally forthcoming about the mothering anxieties provoked by the birth of her daughter.
This memoir could have the air of a mid-life crisis about it, but approaching her fifties, Blain is in a ripe state for retrospection, and her search for proper closure on the deaths of her father and brother gives the book a deeper purpose. It's a search for answers, which do come in the end, but not before a cathartic release that sees the state of Blain's personality shift from the depressive, to the neurotic to the meditative.
Readers will relate to the book's experiences of heartbreak, love, and loss, and Blain discusses sex and death with tact and maturity, steering clear of clichés and creating a heightened sense of awareness and wisdom in their place.
In the final scenes of the memoir, Blain finds herself in exactly the same spot that she has begun, sitting in a room, writing, just like her mother. The result is a satisfying, bittersweet and tender memoir.