Tag: Mental Health

The Unfortunate Lunatic – book review

The Unfortunate Lunatic, by Tess Redgrave

The Unfortunate Lunatic was Tess Redgrave’s paternal great grandfather. He wasn’t always known by that name, of course. He was Christopher Macalister, chemist of Invercargill, a husband and father, sandy-haired with ‘ruddy cheeks and soft blue eyes’. He suffered from ill health and died in 1893, ‘at the early age of thirty-three’. Tess knew nothing about him. Her paternal grandmother she did know personally, knew her troubles and the whispers of madness. Tess herself had bouts of the black dog occasionally, given blue pills, ‘mother’s little helpers’, for anxiety at school. Then, in her mid-thirties and suffering clinical depression, she began to wonder about the possibility of an inherited aspect to her mental condition. With her journalist’s nose for getting to the bottom of things, she went in search of her ancestors.

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One Day a Taniwha–book review

One Day a Taniwha, by Tīhema Baker

I was in the car listening to Pip Adam’s conversation with Tīhema Baker on Better off Read, Episode 162 and he sounded so brilliant I had to make a stop to buy the book. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a hard-hitting novel and very good, though I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone (read on…)

Our narrator of One Day a Taniwha, Hepa, has a terrific literary voice. He had me exhausted, tearful, commiserative, frustrated, angry, all of those both with him and for him. Baker sure knows how to tuck you under the wing of his character and take you along for the emotional ride, all told like a mate spilling the heartfelt beans into your compassionate ear. He’s going through shit, but trusts that you’ll be there for him. He’s not ranting into the void. He’s talking to you.

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Night, Ma – book review

Night, Ma, by Elizabeth Knox

I had bought Night, Ma and left it on my table for a while, wondering if I really wanted to go there when there were nice, frivolous, bouncy books still on the pile to read. I finally opened it with trepidation, still bewildered as to why writers turn themselves inside out to offer up all their innermost vulnerabilities. I’m a late-comer to the intimacy of memoir. Now of course I recognise it is this very vulnerability that makes the genre so compelling. Human nature recognises and engages with truth, and truth is at the heart of every great story. Perhaps we connect with memoir in a more primal way than fiction and feel every scene, every touch, with far more intensity because it’s not just made up out of some frivolous author’s head, or some AI bot. Here’s the truth, as one woman sees it. Night, Ma comes alive through Elizabeth Knox’s almost subcutaneous observations of the people closest to her. And that’s fascinating.

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Sorrow and Bliss—book review

Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason

Sorrow and Bliss is a lively and intelligent book. The author uses her vocabulary well and can summon up a hundred ways to describe ‘awkward’. A lesser author might tell you that a couple sat on sofa and she felt awkward. Mason says: ‘He was sitting at one end of the sofa. I sat down and folded my legs underneath me. Facing him, the posture felt beseeching and I put one foot back on the floor.’ How wonderful is that complicated word–beseeching, and how perfectly it describes this character. There are words and descriptions to admire all thorough this book. ‘The Germans have a word for heartbreak, Martha. Liebeskummer. Isn’t it awful?’

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