I feel a bit as if I’ve come half-way into a conversation with this book, because this memoir by Mandy Sayer is in fact her fourth (no fear of an unexamined life, here). But although it is discussing her life, it is more a love letter to her father, Gerry, addressed to him in the second person.
At my age, one attends an increasing number of funerals. I’ve often been struck by the practice in giving eulogies where the deceased person is addressed as “you”, as if they are present and listening. This is how Sayer speaks to her father, as she revisits their shared life and describes the last months of his life as she visits him daily as he moves between hospice care and her own apartment.
Her father had not been a constant presence in her life. Her parents, Gerry and Betty, separated when she was ten years old. It was an erratic, bohemian, drug-and-alcohol fuelled upbringing, and when she went to live with her mother, along with her siblings Lisa and Gene, her mother subsided further into alcoholism and toxic relationships. There were reconciliations, and further falling aparts. Her father came back into her life when, at the age of 20 she travelled with him to the United States to busk on the streets and parks of New York City, New Orleans and Colorado, he on drum, she tap-dancing. Now, in No Dancing in the Lift her own marriage has ended and she is a published author circulating in the literary scene in Sydney, and her father is dying of cancer.
Her father had been a noted jazz drummer in Sydney, playing with both local and international acts. He had a cleft lip and palate, which affected his speech badly. As I have a cleft myself, I was interested to see the child’s-eye view of the parent’s condition. It was accepted completely, and she knew that he had spent years at Westmead Children’s Hospital having surgery. (Actually, having experienced it myself, I know that surgery was more a recurrent than ongoing event, often with years in between surgeries- although it might not have been remembered that way). At one stage, her father falls asleep open-mouthed, and for the first time, she could see into his mouth and was appalled to see how incompletely the palate had been repaired.
As her father’s cancer progresses, he becomes hostile and belligerent, although this subsides after further health conditions emerge. Her siblings, having survived the same childhood that she did, are troubled people as well: either distant in the case of her sister, or manipulative in the case of her brother. Both parents had embarked on complicated relationships after the marriage breakup, and as Gerry becomes sicker, people and situations emerge from his past. But fellow musicians and writers emerge as well, and the reefers and drinks flow in what must have seemed a racketty lifestyle in the midst of the inflexibility and judgement of hospitals and institutions.
In the midst of this, Sayer meets fellow author Louis Nowra, who was married at the time and their relationship deepens from initial attraction, to a chaste and tentative friendship, then to a full-blown love affair, observed and encouraged by her father Gerry. Death and love, both becoming stronger at the same time: it is a confronting, and yet in many ways, perfectly natural conjunction.
She has not changed names in this book, and so you meet authors Louis Nowra and Linda Jaivan, musician Jeff Duff, and actors Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett move in and out of the pages. It is an intensely local book, with the landscapes of Sydney and Darlinghurst described evocatively.
From the start of the book, you know as a reader how the book is going to end. What did surprise me was that these events took place twenty five years ago, as the rawness and the hollowness seemed so recent. Although I shouldn’t really be surprised because, as the child, you are always the child. Although, as she says, her father has taught her how to grow old- and in his case, unrepentantly and without necessarily growing up.
My rating: 8.5/10
Sourced from: review copy from Transit Lounge, via Scott Eathorne.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 