There is so much to enjoy in this book. I felt immediately I was in good hands, with a writer who had the confidence to take her time describing scenes to bring me into her space and letting me settle into the surroundings before moving on to the action. We could be in a park by an Auckland motorway, in a nightclub, or at Ripiro beach, and each scene is painted with a keen sense of observational detail. Here’s a paragraph that really is worth reading twice, just for the pleasure of the writing:
In the distance, snaking across the bridge over the water that links West with Central Auckland, is a silver car, a bright orange and red rubbish truck, a white van, a blue car. Never-ending. Behind the cars, the Waitākere Ranges lie heavy against the hem of the smudged grey sky. There’s a sprawl of buildings, then those cars and trucks flowing like unstoppable thoughts, then the stone wall holding up the motorway that subsides to muddy flats. Closer still: pohutukawa trees — four, like a tally, disrobed of their blood-coloured blossoms. The water, blue-brown from last night’s rain. At one of three park benches down on the grass, a man in a grey hoodie furiously writes, a green smoothie at his elbow.
I’ve marked up many passages in this book to go back to and read aloud.
Memoirs I do find a bit of a challenge. In a fictionalised story an author can introduce any ideas they want and these can be massaged to fit a plot, whereas in memoir the writer is trying, above all else, to offer their truth. The plot is real life, which is never smooth. Truth told like this, not told face-to-face but offered so fearlessly on a page, I find a bit confronting. Especially when it covers subjects such as childbirth, death, families, and that slippage you feel when your life is being lived at a step removed, angrily, through a barrier, that no one else can understand. There are concepts in this book to which I can absolutely relate but personally could never write without a fictional cloak (and certainly not as elegantly).
Like Noelle McCarthy’s Grand, Ripiro Beach takes you deep into the writer’s intimate world, but it’s more than that. It’s not just about the things that happened to the narrator of these books, but how it felt, evoking feelings and responses in the reader. Memoirs like these are such gifts, especially from these very cool, articulate women. As I said after reading Grand, you do feel like you have been invited to see the author naked.
Ripero beach begins with Caroline in hospital bleeding to death after childbirth, brought back from the brink with visions of having left her body and floating outside her house looking in at her husband and daughters living without her. She doesn’t seem to recover from this experience, not fully, and lives her life in a cage of post-traumatic stress, going through the motions but unable to engage fully. She has been high-flying, running her own modelling agency but the pleasure had drained from her work. She had been ‘hustling, mediating, strapping on heels and lipstick every day to go into battle for talent and clients and staff. I’d loved my work, but it became a dress that no longer fit‘.
In trying to make sense of how she feels, she goes in search of her adopted father’s family, almost obsessionally, as if the knowledge will cure her. Not something I would suggest for anyone with depression, and so it seems when, after a bit of sleuthing, the initial details she turns up bring stories of suicide, depression, institutions, incarceration. She’s not deterred. A big section of the book is dedicated to this work, and how Caroline grows into and owns her family history, which later has some positive and affirming revelations. She says ‘there I go again, piling into history with not enough regard for the rules‘ but there are no rules for finding a connection with your whakapapa. If you feel it, it’s real.
The part of the book I did find joyous is when the family discovers a holiday house at Ripiro beach which becomes their sanctuary, the beach scenes familiar to every kiwi who has ever holidayed at the beach with crabs and rock pools, sand dams and cartwheeling, handstanding on the sand. It takes a long time to get to this place, but once at Ripiro Beach the anger that propels the story doesn’t feel as necessary, and the life that didn’t make sense begins to be understood in a much wider context.
The book ends with a new beginning:
‘Tēnā kōutou katoa,’ I begin. ‘Nau mai, haere mai. Ko Caroline Barron tōku ingoa. Tēnā kōutou, tēnā kōutou, tēnā kōutou katoa.‘
Cristina Sanders' blog 