One Life: My Mother's Story

I enjoyed Kate Grenville's One Life so much -- more than I expected to. She is just such a readable writer, even when handling material that by her own admission, might seem very ordinary. It's a biography of Grenville's mother, Nance, but it reads like a novel, and I kept eagerly turning the pages.

Mind you, Nance was not really such an ordinary woman. One her friends described her as 'remarkable,' and in many ways she was exceptional, despite living all her life in sleepy Australian towns and suburbs. But even the most ordinary lives contain their own drama and pathos. Nance was the child of an unhappy marriage, of pub owners Dolly and Bert (Grenville has also written about her grandmother in Restless Dolly Maunder, which I might check out next). (The pub owning background was also interesting on the heels of reading Australian Gospel.) Nance trains as a pharmacist at a time when it was unusual for woman to gain professional qualifications, but once she's attained her apprenticeship, she's qualified herself out of a job. She marries Kenneth, a closet Trotskyist, and their partnership has its ups and downs -- he's proud of her for working, but is clueless about taking up the domestic burden. Time and again Nance is thwarted by lack of childcare in her community.

One Life is a loving, clear-eyed tribute to a woman whose story becomes extraordinary in Grenville's hands, and a kind of first hand history of the middle decades of Australia, covering the Great Depression and the wars. I loved it.