Tilda Is Visible

Jane Tara's novel Tilda is Visible has a cracking premise. Middle aged and older women often complain about feeling invisible; what if invisibility was a real, physical condition?

'I'm disappearing?'

'We don't use that term anymore. Invisibility advocates are very much against it. Women who suffer from invisibility don't literally disappear. You may be invisible, but you're certainly not disappearing. There's a difference.'

Tilda is fifty two, her unsatisfactory marriage has ended and she's feeling unfulfilled in her business life. To her horror, she finds that bits of her are vanishing -- first a finger, then an ear, a nose. She joins a support group where she meets women who have become completely invisible. And everyone tells her there is no cure. What to do?

Well, spoiler alert, Tilda does find ways to fight back and restore her visibility, which involve unpacking past trauma, lots of supportive female friendships, hefty doses of meditation, rewriting her mental scripts, and photography, as well as meeting a lovely guy (who happens to be blind). However, this is very much a story of self-rescue, and while there are lots of funny moments early on, the mood shifts to a more earnest exploration of female sense of self, domestic abuse and the social irrelevance of older women.

Tilda Is Visible would be a great choice for book clubs, and there's even a handy list of questions at the back to make the discussion easier.
 

The Residence

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower was such a fun, fascinating read! I bought this book for my younger daughter after we both watched the Netflix murder mystery, The Residence, partly based on Brower's book (the Netflix show was also a fun, fascinating experience: recommended, with a particular shout-out to the bonus Australian content!)

No murder mysteries here, unless you count the Kennedy assassination (which of course was not fun at all). But The Residence offers a glimpse inside the institution of the heart of the White House, the second and third floors where the President and his family live, and the hidden warren of workrooms, kitchens, stores and offices where the staff mostly invisibly carry out their duties. Presidential families come and go, but the staff stay on, often for decades, more loyal to the job than to the current incumbent.

There are loads of juicy anecdotes here, some of which made their way (suitably disguised) into the Netflix series (like LBJ's weird obsession with his shower). Some Presidents and their spouses come out of the staff accounts better than others. The senior Bushes were beloved for their relaxed, friendly attitude; LBJ was, frankly, a psycho; the Clintons, not surprisingly, had a tense, paranoid relationship, though Chelsea was unfailingly sweet. Nancy Reagan is not reported on well. One shudders to think what the Trumps would be like to live with... (The Residence stops near the end of the Obamas' tenure.)

One aspect of The Residence that left me slightly uneasy is the racial element of the staff hierarchy. The maids and butlers are overwhelmingly people of colour; but the top chefs, ushers, housekeepers etc tend to be white. I don't know if anything's changed since 2015, and Brower is open about discussing the history of the staff hiring policy, but it still left me with a faint unpleasant taste in the mouth.

I don't know why I'm so interested in stories about servants, but The Residence was a great addition to my collection, with an intriguing American twist.

England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth Century Fiction

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I bit off more than I could chew with this book! I couldn't resist the title, but when it arrived from Brotherhood Books, I realised that it was a very scholarly collection of essays from three La Trobe University History and English academics: Ann Blake, Leela Gandhi and Sue Thomas. I did my best to keep up, but some of the chapters defeated me.

Part 1 consisted of some general essays, and Part 2 looked at several individual authors of colonial origins who had 'returned' to England and explored the 'mother country' in their fiction. I was familiar with Katherine Mansfield (NZ) and Christina Stead (Australia), less so with Jean Rhys (the Caribbean). I have read a bit of Doris Lessing, but I think I was too young for The Golden Notebook; The Good Terrorist did leave a deep impression on me. I have to confess that I've never had much more than a dutiful interest in VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, and I struggled with their chapters. I've never heard of Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta, but I'm definitely intrigued now, and likewise David Dabydeen is a new author to me.

I'm still interested in the subject of authors bringing their various colonial and post-colonial perspectives to the colonising country -- most of them are at best ambivalent, some downright scathing -- but perhaps reading their novels might be a better place for me to start.

More Than We Can Tell

 

I borrowed Brigid Kemmerer's More Than We Can Tell because it includes a teenager who makes her own online game, but unlike Slay, the online world plays only a relatively minor role in this story. This novel is a kind of sequel to Letters to the Lost, and the characters of Juliet and Declan reappear here. However, the novel centres on a different pair: reclusive, damaged Rev (aka the Grim Reaper, because he's always shrouded in a hoodie) and Emma, torn between her distracted computer geek father and her critical, driven doctor mother.

Emma's game features because she's being harassed by a player called Nightmare; she's also befriended by a supportive player called Ethan (we never discover if they are, in fact, the same person). Her parents' marriage is dissolving, and in the midst of all this, she strikes up a tentative friendship with 'weirdo' Rev. We learn that Rev has many reasons to be weird, mostly connected with his estranged, abusive father. These two defensive characters have to overcome their inner demons to help each other.

I quickly became hooked by More Than We Can Tell. It's a very YA novel; especially early in the book, I felt like shaking both Rev and Emma and urging them to just tell their parents how they were feeling -- it would have saved a lot of drama! But I can imagine adolescent readers gobbling up this tortured romance with a spoon. 

I think I was most horrified to learn about Lucky Charms, allegedly a breakfast cereal, eaten by Rev and his foster brother, which consists of MARSHMALLOWS and 'frosted oats.' It sounds horrific, and definitely not something anyone should eat for breakfast.