Australian Gospel

  

I think I heard Lech Blaine interviewed by Richard Fidler on Radio National's Conversations and was intrigued by his extraordinary family story. Now having read Australian Gospel, I don't know how he could have compressed the saga into one hour-long interview. Essentially, Lech's parents fostered a gang of other children, including two brothers and a sister, the children of Michael and Mary Shelley (just two of the names they went by, in long and confusing lives). The Shelleys never accepted that their children should have been removed from their care, and engaged in a campaign of harassment, death threats, stalking, attempted abductions and relentless hate mail over several decades. The children regarded themselves as the family of Tom and Lenore Blaine, and never wanted to return to the Shelleys, but this made no difference to the Shelleys' attitude.

Michael Shelley went through various incarnations as a preacher, drug addict and anti-drug campaigner, and he and Mary travelled all over the world (it's not clear how they managed to pay for this travel, as neither of them ever seems to have held gainful employment, or not for long). Mary Shelley suffered from mental illness and spent time in various hospitals (they both also spent time in prison). Tracing their movements across the country and the world, and in and out of institutions, makes the reader's head spin. Lech Blaine's writing style is deliberately succinct and elliptical, which keeps the narrative speeding along; he says that he chose a novelistic approach as a way of handling this mass of bewildering and confronting material, and the life stories of so many (real) people, including himself. (Lech was named after Lech Walesa, the Polish labour activist hero.)

Australian Gospel is a fascinating and disturbing story, but ultimately it's a tale of the triumph of love and persistence over delusion and narcissism.

Your Name is Not Anxious

Anxiety sucks. I've been there, so have most of my family and some of my friends. It's not a place you want to dwell, or even visit for very long. Stephanie Dowrick, who has had her own mental health battles, has written a friendly, approachable guide for sufferers, reminding us that while anxiety can feel overwhelming, it is not our whole identity; that it's vital to treat ourselves with compassion and kindness, rather than blame and guilt; that anxiety is a whole-body experience, not just 'in our minds;' that there are emergency measures we can take in a moment of crisis (breathing techniques, cold water, reducing causes of stress (can be easier said than done!)).

It's all great advice, delivered in short, easily-digested chapters, and the book is designed for dipping in and out as needed, rather than being read cover to cover, which is what I did. Much of the material is reinforced in more than one place, which is helpful -- in my experience, these messages need repeating over and over, and even then they sometimes don't sink in. I can imagine Your Name is Not Anxious as a comforting bedside companion, to be used in times of crisis along with professional therapeutic help, exercise and medication if needed; I don't think it would be enough to pull you out of an episode on its own. There are also personal stories from others who have wrestled with OCD, body anxieties and addiction, and come out the other side, which is always a good reminder. The dark valley can seem like a long, deep crevasse at times, and it's helpful to remember that it can and does end.

Darkest Night, Brightest Star

Darkest Night, Brightest Star is a fantastic inclusion on the CBCA Notables list -- a really timely, pertinent and immediate book about Australian masculinity. Barry Jonsberg is an elder statesman of Australian YA writing, and he turns his former teacher's eye on the kind of boy I bet he saw a lot of in his classrooms. Morgan is thirteen, not interested in school, growing up with his dad and older brother after his mother left the family when he was just two. Morgan is not articulate; he keeps himself to himself, and not surprisingly, he's internalised a lot of not-great messages from the men in his family, who believe in never showing emotion (especially not vulnerability or fear), belittling women, and physical toughness as the measure of a man. But Morgan befriends Gray (who turns out to be gay); he'd rather look after plants than kick a ball on the soccer field; and his innate kindness comes to the fore when he starts helping out an old woman, Mary, who has a muddled idea that Morgan might be her own long-lost son.

Darkest Night, Brightest Star has a tight cast of characters. Sometimes the reader is able to draw connections that Morgan is a little slower to make. Morgan makes plenty of mistakes as he goes along, but he's lucky to have a handful of people in his life who really care about him, and at the end of the day, that's all any of us can ask for. The book doesn't wrap up everything in a tidy bow, but there is hope for Morgan (maybe not for his dad, who is not a great guy -- though Jonsberg drops us some hints about he became the damaged person that he is, and how he's passed on that legacy to his elder son). I hope boys read this book and perhaps see something of themselves in Morgan. I really liked it. The only element that Jonsberg hasn't tried to deal with here is the pernicious influence of the online 'manosphere' (I wish we had a better name for it), but maybe that's too big a topic to shoehorn into a short novel.

28

Helen Garner's The Season is a book about football written from the outside looking in, by a loving grandmother witnessing awkward moments at training, courage and vulnerability on the field. In contrast, Brandon Jack's memoir, 28, is written from the inside of an AFL club, the experience so intense that there is no outside world.

Brandon Jack, son of rugby great Garry and brother of star AFL player Kieran, spent several years on the Sydney Swans list without ever quite breaking into the regular side. 28 refers to the number of senior games he ended up playing; often he served as an emergency, floating uncomfortably between seniors and reserves. No matter how manically he trained, how much self-punishment he meted out, he could never quite lift himself over that invisible line. For the last couple of years, he lost interest in the game, faking an injury to get out of playing seniors, leading the drinking games and mindless destruction of his fellow fringe players (I expect his recently released novel Pissants will cover these activities in more detail).

There is insight in Jack's story, and he writes with eloquence about trying to belong in a sporting team without losing his sense of self, but the largest pain here, and one he doesn't examine too closely, lies in his family. Jack and his parents were estranged for years (though I gather they have a better relationship now), but we only get glimpses of the casual brutality of his father's expectations and the effect they must have had on Jack and his two brothers. The brothers' decision to change codes from rugby to AFL was a dreadful blow to their father; not wanting to play football at all was unthinkable. But Brandon's true passions are music and writing, not sport.

28 is subtitled A Memoir of Football, Addiction, Art, Masculinity and Love. That's a lot to bite off, and perhaps it's no wonder that Jack can't fully chew the whole mouthful. Still, this is a remarkably candid and painful memoir and well worth a read.

Sociopath

I heard Patric Gagne speaking on the radio one night and was intrigued by the sound of her memoir, Sociopath -- there was a very long wait on the library reserve list before I finally got my hands on it.

Honestly, Sociopath was a strange and unsettling read. At times it comes across almost like a novel, with reconstructed scenes and dialogues. Gagne makes the excellent point that there is a lot of grey around the diagnosis and even the definition of sociopathy. Is it the same as psychopathy, just further down the spectrum? The same test is used for assessment, but there is apparently a vast gulf between psychopathy and 'normal,' which is presumably where sociopathy sits. Gagne likes to define sociopathy as a kind of learning disability, but for emotions -- empathy, jealousy, compassion can be learned, but with difficulty (anger and happiness come more easily, at least for Gagne). 

Gane talks al lot about 'apathy,' which I found quite confusing -- sometimes it's good, sometimes unbearable. I must admit I became a bit lost at times as Gagne described her strategies for relieving the weight of apathy, though her descriptions of the rising tension, which could only be relieved by 'bad' actions (stealing a car, stabbing a classmate with a pencil), reminded me a lot of Gabor Matè's account of the unbearable tension of distress experienced by the drug users he works with. Whatever the origin of these impulses, it seems clear that the brain uses a similar mechanism to try to relieve its pain.

By the end of Sociopath, I can't claim that I understand sociopathy much better than I did, but I do have more sympathy for this maligned minority.
 

The Clearing

Scottish artist Samantha Clark's 2020 book, The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health was in a bundle of books lent to me by my good friend composer Chris McCombe. It's a slender but dense volume, an intensely personal story which I initially found quite tough going. At first I thought the 'clearing' of the title referred to an open space in the woods -- even if it was a metaphorical space -- but no. The book begins with Clark and her two brothers clearing out their family home in Glasgow, a process which eventually ends up taking them three years (!!)

It's immediately obvious that this was not a happy home -- not because Clark's parents weren't loving, but because her mother's severe mental illness made demands on her father and on the siblings which crushed all the joy from their lives. As the memoir unfolds, Clark reflects on her difficulties in connecting with either of her parents, her struggle to find freedom away from home and her feelings of guilt and shame, love and hurt, anger and grief. Though Clark is a visual artist, she expresses these feelings beautifully in words and metaphors -- the concept of ether, which both holds and separates; the light perceptible even within the deepest darkness, the darkness that enables us to discern the light; the dutiful acts of personal care (grocery shopping, nail cutting) performed unwillingly but conscientiously.

I must admit that about a third of the way through The Clearing I was thinking, this is the grimmest book I've ever read! and wondering why Chris had lent it to me. But as the house is gradually cleared, Clark finds her own emotions settling and also becoming clearer, and by the end of the book, she is finding peace and creativity in her artistic practice, moving away from her demanding academic job and swapping the chaos of the city for the wild weather of Orkney. I was thrilled to see that she recently won a major art prize, too. The Clearing is not an easy read, but it is a beautiful and rewarding one.

Friends, Lovers and the Big, Terrible Thing

Matthew Perry's memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was a birthday present. I've been wanting to read it ever since Perry's shock death in October last year. Insecure, witty Chandler Bing was my favourite Friends character; Chandler and Monica's romance unfolded in parallel with my own courtship with my husband, and I followed it avidly. I was dimly aware that Perry had suffered from a painkiller addiction during one season of Friends, (one season? Huh!) but I stupidly assumed that he had gone to rehab and got over it. How wrong I was.

Friends, Lovers is a painful read. Perry started drinking at eleven, moved on to opiates (though he always balked at heroin) and ketamine, and never broke free from addiction to one substance or another for longer than a year or so until the day he died. He tells how, as a colicky baby, a doctor prescribed phenobarbitol to stop him crying; was that when his brain chemistry was irretrievably altered? Or was his deep anxiety the source of the black hole inside he was never able to fill, not with gorgeous girlfriends, not with fame, not with money or artistic success? 

The tragedy of Matthew Perry is that he was never able to convince himself that he was enough. Plenty of people tried to help him; he made numerous attempts to help himself, and sometimes he would seem to succeed in shaking off his demons. But never for long. There was a particular anguish in reading the end of the book, where he declares that he's clean for good this time, knowing full well that he would be dead within a year. It's hard to escape the conclusion that his sad, premature ending was inevitable. Perhaps the saddest part is that he really was just as smart, funny and surrounded by love as Chandler; yet as Perry himself points out, Chandler was able to mature and achieve the goals that Matthew Perry the actor never could.
 

The Myth of Normal

Another book group recommendation (thanks, Chris). I had this book on reserve at the library for months, but when my husband brought it home for me, I almost fainted. The Myth of Normal is a BRICK! Subtitled Illness, Health and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Gabor Maté and his co-author, son Daniel, explore the ways in which our modern lives are quite literally making us sick. Maté argues that not only is modern civilisation literally poisoning us with a cocktail of toxic chemicals, pollution, poor food and
 environmental destruction, we are also psychologically suffering from a disconnection from the natural world and the supports of community. 

Maté makes a strong case for these imbalances and stressors being expressed in our bodymind -- physical manifestions of mental and emotional stress. He draws on his own long clinical career as well as others' observations to point out examples like the fact that 'nice' people, mostly women, seem to suffer disproportionately from motor neurone disease, and postulates that it might be the result of being TOO nice, squashing down their own needs to help others. I'm not entirely sure that I buy this particular example, but it's definitely an interesting concept and well worth exploring.

It's hard to disagree that we would be a healthier culture if we were better connected to each other, if we thought of ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, if we prioritised the joys of life rather than accumulating money and power. Isn't it odd how all these books end up coming to very similar conclusions? Perhaps the ancients were wise after all.

The Joy Thief

One of my children has been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I'm fairly sure that my father also has it -- or more likely, after reading The Joy Thief, he seems to have the subtly different Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Anyway, this is all new territory so I thought I'd better start educating myself. Luckily for me, Penny Moodie's book has just come out. (How weird is this? I heard Penny discussing her book and OCD on the ABC radio's Conversations show just after I started reading The Joy Thief, and the guest on the very next day was Pip Williams, whose book The Bookbinder of Jericho I'm also reading! Spooky, eh?)

OCD sucks. We're used to thinking of it in movie cliches of endless hand-washing or counting, but it's probably more accurate to focus on the unwanted, obtrusive and distressing thoughts that spark off the protective rituals. Thoughts that go round and round, thoughts that don't go away, thoughts about forbidden desires or bizarre urges, thoughts about danger and harm striking loved ones (this one I can relate to). The only thing that seems to temporarily quiet the obsessive thoughts is performing the compulsions -- and the compulsions can also be thoughts. But the catch is, the more you perform the compulsions, the more you 'feed the lion' and the stronger the unwanted thoughts become.

Moodie is a strong advocate for ERP therapy (Exposure and Response Prevention), which essentially means sitting with the uncomfortable thoughts and not performing the soothing compulsive actions, until the brain is gradually retrained to tolerate the thoughts. The important thing to remember for a carer or support person is not to offer reassurance, because that is also feeding the lion -- a difficult thing to resist, because of course your first impulse when you see someone you love hurting is to try to reassure them.

I feel sure there is a long road ahead but The Joy Thief is a terrific insight and a great place to start.

Drop Dead Healthy

I've developed a real fondness for A.J. Jacobs and his quixotic quests to know everything, live biblically, and solve every puzzle (though I haven't read that one yet). Drop Dead Healthy (2012) covers two years of Jacobs' life during which he strives to become the healthiest man alive, one body part at a time -- so we get chapters devoted to the ears, the nose, the lungs, the heart, the stomach, the back etc.

Jacobs is always entertaining company, and I enjoyed his attempts at bodily self-improvement. He changes his diet, starts eating with a small plate and little fork, starts working on a homemade treadmill desk (this habit seems to stick, and he becomes quite evangelical about it), takes part in a triathlon, and takes advice from a whole battalion of experts. In a handy appendix, he lists the ten best pieces of advice he received (shop at the edges of the supermarket; don't eat white food; eat protein for breakfast), and there's another appendix with tips for guerilla exercise (always take the stairs; literally run your errands). In fact, you could probably just read the appendices if you want health advice; but the point is to go on the journey with A.J. and his long-suffering family. I'm not the first to observe that his wife Julie deserves a medal.

There are a couple of sobering notes among the jollity. Jacobs loses his beloved grandfather and aunt during the project; ironically, his aunt is completely health-obsessed, compulsively avoiding toxins and consuming organic everything, and yet she succumbs to a particularly nasty cancer. No matter what precautions you take, something is going to get you in the end. Perhaps the trick is just to be as healthy and happy as you can before you get there.

One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Egg

My younger daughter, who is a big Goodies fan and also a fan of birds, requested this book and now I've read it too. Bill Oddie is best known and loved in Australia as a member of the Goodies, whose program was endlessly repeated in a child friendly slot on the ABC (just before Dr Who) for years and years, so we learned the episodes by heart. In fact as an adult I was somewhat startled to discover quite a few episodes that were not child-friendly at all. In the UK, the Goodies was considered a comedy for adults.

Oddie's autobiography falls into distinct sections. The most fascinating is the first, where he discusses his childhood. His mother 'left' the family when he was a small boy -- she was hospitalised with mental illness for much of Oddie's life, and he never really got to know her at all, finding out some crucial facts only when he took part in Who Do You Think You Are? much later in life. His father was supportive but rather passive, and his grandmother seems, frankly, to have been a horrible woman with plenty of issues of her own. Given Bill's own battles with mental illness, this part of the book is really touching and sad.

His years with the Goodies and later TV work are skimmed over in rather cursory fashion, and then suddenly we are plunged into a real-time crisis, as Oddie slides into a depressive episode in the middle of writing the book. Eventually he pulls out of it, but it's a raw and quite startling interlude. The book ends on what's probably intended as a bright note, as he looks forward to making more wildlife programs (his real passion) and perhaps mastering a computer. However, this made an unexpectedly poignant ending, as I'd already googled and discovered that the year after the completing the book, Oddie was sacked from presenting his beloved wildlife series and ended up hospitalised for depression for most of the following year.

One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Egg is an uneven book, but in its own way, an unexpectedly absorbing one.

The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling

What a lovely book! I was late to the party on The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling, but I'm so glad I made the effort to catch up with it. It's a love story, and a story about mental illness, and a story about growing up between two cultures; a story about family, and work, and anxiety. Anna is the eldest child, torn between being a surrogate parent to her siblings while her mum is 'in bed' and her father is busy running the family restaurant, and trying to keep up at school. It was refreshing to read a young adult novel where the solution isn't an escape into academia -- instead Anna finds her greatest strength in helping her father in the family business.

Wait Chim has written a beautiful, warm and engaging family story, shot through with moments of genuine fear, helplessness and fury. Living with a family member who is suffering from mental illness is no joke, and I appreciate that Chim has resisted the temptation for a simple happy ending. The road to recovery can be long and complicated and Chim doesn't shy away from that reality, but she also shows how families and friends can pull together to support each other, as well as the person with the illness. This is a book about feeling responsibility and overcoming shame as much as anything else, and I loved it.
 

Head First

 

As frequently happens these days, I was alerted to this book by Susan Green and immediately ordered it in at the library. Head First is subtitled A Psychiatrist's Stories of Mind and Body, which is a very accurate description. Having worked for years as a physician in hospitals before becoming a psychiatrist, Alistair Santhouse is in a good position to assess how mind and body intertwine. I was struck by his observation that we often seek medical explanations of physical -- I was going to say symptoms, but that in itself implies a larger Something Wrong -- sensations might be a better word, perhaps? when sometimes there is no physical explanation, or the true culprit is a state of mind rather than a disease. 

Santhouse's account of the spiral of ever more tests and scans producing diminishing returns, perhaps ruling out one explanation, but not settling on a definite cause, reminded me of Atal Gawande's Being Mortal, where he described how treatments can also spiral endlessly while producing less benefit each time. It seems it's easy to become trapped in the medical cycle, whether at the stage of diagnosis or treatment, but so difficult to extract oneself.

Santhouse's stories of individual patients are fascinating and often moving, and they don't all have happy endings. He is especially insightful when he criticises the shortcomings of the hospital system -- overworked staff, a loss of team spirit, a lack of care and empathy for staff that trickles down to patients. There is even a final chapter reflecting on Covid. A thoughtful, wise and intriguing read.

Nowhere To Hide

 

It's hard to believe that six years have passed since that glorious day in 2016 when the Western Bulldogs won the AFL Premiership for the first time in 62 years. Tom Boyd was an integral part of that victory, playing perhaps the best game of his life, scoring three goals, including the breathtaking kick that sealed the game and resulted in this iconic image, with teammate Toby McLean jumping on his back, the very personification of joy and triumph:

Image: Fox Sports

Bulldogs supporters claim that in that single moment, Tom Boyd justified his enormous contract, at the time the biggest ever awarded to a player -- he was worth every penny. But that moment, and the huge contract deal, came at a tremendous personal cost to Boyd. Nowhere To Hide is the story of his football career, and more importantly, his personal journey through hell and out the other side.

Reading this book, combined with the recent appalling allegations of racism emerging from Hawthorn, and the long and sorry history of racism, misogyny and other scandals, have done a lot to put me off the whole sport of football. Correction, it's not a sport -- it's an industry. And like any business where there is far too much money sloshing around, common decency toward individuals, let alone empathy and compassion, seem to get lost in the mix.

On the surface, Tom Boyd seemed to have it all -- a young, white, privileged male, gifted with athletic talent, smart, articulate, good-looking, a number one draft pick -- surely he was living the dream? And he copped a huge amount of abuse for this very reason. If anything went wrong, he felt ungrateful, and he felt the pressure of everyone's expectations. When it sunk in for me that when he made the decision to leave GWS to come to the Western Bulldogs, he was younger than my daughter is now, I was horrified. He was a twenty year old kid, prone to injury, suffering from anxiety and insomnia, not sure who to trust, reluctant to admit he was struggling, because he felt as if he was letting everyone down.

After reading Nowhere To Hide, I don't think I will ever voice a criticism of a footballer again, even in the privacy of my own living room. I feel ashamed of the casual insults I've voiced aloud, telling myself it's all part of the theatre of the game. No, these are vulnerable young men, many of them just kids, trying their hardest, and suffering demons in their heads that we know nothing about. Shame on us all.

My Age of Anxiety

 

I have anxiety. My mother has anxiety. My grandfather (almost certainly) had anxiety. One of my daughters has anxiety. But I don't think any of us have suffered the extreme torments that have tortured Scott Stossel from his earliest childhood, through adolescence and into an apparently successful adulthood.

It was quite harrowing to read Stossel's struggles with various phobias, particularly his terror of vomiting, which I didn't even know was a thing, but has more victims than fear of flying. He intersperses his personal account of trying to deal with crippling, lifelong dread (psychotherapy, medication, one particularly distressing attempt at exposure treatment) with the latest brain science that attempts to tease out where anxiety comes from, how it serves us, and how we can try to overcome it.

My Age of Anxiety is a very readable and intelligent examination of mental health and a memoir of pain and dread. Stossel is optimistic and nuanced in his approach, recognising the tension in his concern that Americans might be over-medicated, with his own long-term dependence on that same medication. This is not an easy topic but it is very timely and a great summary of the current science.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

 

I acquired this book from my good friend Chris, and I almost laughed when I started reading it, because if you were writing a book calculated to appeal to Chris, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox would be that book. For a start, it's set in Scotland, Chris's ancestral home and a country where she lived for several years; and it's also concerned with madness, and the way notions of madness and hysteria have been used to oppress women, which is a topic which has fascinated her for decades.

Our contemporary protagonist, Iris, discovers to her dismay that she has a elderly relative whose existence she has never known about: Esme Lennox, her grandmother's sister, who has been held in a mental hospital for over sixty years, since she was just sixteen years old. Through Esme's memories and the dementia-affected musings of Iris's grandmother Kitty, we gradually learn the story of how Esme ended up in Cauldstone, uncovering some dark secrets along the way.

I haven't read any of Maggie O'Farrell's fiction before but The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is well-crafted story-telling. I wasn't a massive fan of the subplot concerning Iris's step-brother Alex, which I felt didn't add much to the central story, but otherwise I really enjoyed this novel.

Wintering

 

I love this cover, I would happily hang it on my wall. Katherine May's Wintering is another recommendation from Susan Green. We don't often disagree on books and Wintering is no exception. It's true, not all of us are in a position to be able to retreat and hunker down when times are tough, but it's also true that often that is exactly what we need. I think of all those antique novels where the protagonists are sent away to "rest" in the country (usually at the farmhouse of some elderly former nanny or a distant relative) or to "recover" by the seaside. Long walks, fresh air, plenty of fresh food usually does the trick and our sufferer is back to their old selves.

I liked the descriptions of northerly winters with their snowy landscapes and cosy firesides, though seasons in our hemisphere don't follow that stark course (thank goodness -- I remember my sole Scottish winter when the sky seemed to press on the top of my head like a leaden lid and daylight only lasted about four hours, I couldn't stand it and had to run home to Aussie summer). I liked the account of restorative winter swimming, which is apparently extremely beneficial for both physical and emotional health, and something I heard recommended a couple of years ago by Wim Hof devotees at a mind-body-spirit festival. I'm not brave enough to take the plunge, though I am trying feebly to at least briefly douse myself in cold water under the shower most days.

I even liked that Katherine May ended the book by admitting that she hadn't managed to include everything she'd planned -- she didn't travel as far or interview as many people as she intended. But adjusting our expectations of ourselves is part of "wintering" too, something that many of us experienced during last year's lockdown. (And I'm very aware that having a "good lockdown" is also a highly privileged experience.) But maybe it's time to see that slowing down, just hanging out at home rather than rushing in all directions, finding time for slow activities like cooking and knitting and jigsaws, can be healthy, rather than lazy and self-indulgent. I'm all for wintering. 

Helicopter Man

Elizabeth Fensham's debut novel Helicopter Man won the CBCA Book of the Year for Younger Readers in 2006. Like The Wych Elm, it revolves around perceptions of reality and memory.

Pete and his dad are on the run. Pete's diary offers us an entertaining account of their difficulties hiding out in an old shed, but very quickly the reader is aware that something is deeply wrong. It's not until quite late in the book that Pete grasps that his father is actually mentally ill, and that the danger  he fears from helicopters and pursuers exists only in his mind.

This is a poignant little book. Luckily Pete connects with old friends and makes new ones, and his father finds the help he needs. It's not an unalloyed happy ending, but there is definitely hope on the horizon. Though this novel is only fifteen years old, I have a nasty suspicion that there might be less support out there for the Pete's dads of this world than there used to be. Helicopter Man would be a great resource for kids with mental illness in the family, and it's a good story in its own right. Set in Melbourne, which is a bonus.

Disclaimer: I purchased this book after having lunch with Elizabeth, who is a lovely person. Totally didn't influence my opinion, though!

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

I picked up my copy of Gail Honeyman's smash hit, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, from Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Hospital's second hand book shelves earlier this year. My copy is plastered with even more award stickers than the one in the picture, and after reading it, it's easy to see how it's amassed so many accolades.

This is a mystery story, in some ways a horror story, but packaged up in highly entertaining wrapping. Eleanor Oliphant tells her own story, and her voice is fresh, funny and very distinctive, even while she's recounting a story of pain, loneliness and childhood abuse that might be impossible to digest otherwise. At times the reader almost feels guilty for finding Eleanor amusing, as she is clearly dealing with a legacy of tremendous suffering.

As always, salvation lies in connection. Through small acts of kindness, Eleanor re-enters the world she has shut out, and it's rewarding to journey with her, as bit by bit, she blossoms. She is supposed to be about thirty, but sometimes she reads like a woman twice that age. A bonus is that the book is set in Glasgow and lovely Scottishness lies over the whole book like a mist. An excellent pick-up.