Review: The Mirror Book

In 2015, I interviewed Auckland writer Charlotte Grimshaw - a sharp-eyed chronicler of self-damaging characters - about her novel, Starlight Peninsula.

I had met her before, and she seemed much the same: friendly, polite, elusive. A clumsy attempt to ask about growing up with her writer father C.K. (Karl) Stead drew a bland response. Her childhood in the Hobson Bay villa, where her parents - Karl and his wife Kay, now in their late 80s - still live, sounded pleasant. She trotted out some names of Dad’s writer friends; she - the middle child with two siblings - had devoured “all the good children’s books.” She and her father, she added, “get on very well and we do our own thing and it works just fine.”

Grimshaw’s neck was covered by a scarf, masking the scar from recent surgery to remove a lump on her thyroid gland. The scar looked, she said, “a bit like someone has slashed my throat.” An alarming scare, but possibly useful for a future book. Things happen, make a story out of it, Karl had taught her: “It’s material.”

It’s material all right, probably not as he would want it, for her new work, written during the past few years as a parallel project while she continued to turn “her preoccupations” into fiction in the novel Mazarine (2018).

The Mirror Book, a memoir (she is 55, with three adult children), is a transfixing account of life, from Grimshaw’s point of view, in the Stead household. It’s the most harrowing, profoundly moving work of her prolific career. It opens around the time of the neck surgery, an almost-trivial hiccup in the proximity of a marital breakdown and what she describes as the withdrawal of support from her parents, especially her mother.

“Just after my marriage crisis, my mother stopped speaking to me,” she writes. Kay’s behaviour was nothing new in a series of estrangements through the years. But, says Grimshaw, Karl compounded the situation by refusing to believe it was even happening: “She speaks to you all the time,” he insisted.

“Years of arguing with Karl and Kay took its toll,” Grimshaw says. In a state of complete psychic exhaustion, she took stock: “I found myself alone without a single close [female] friend to call on.”

Grimshaw and her husband reunited, but the dynamics had necessarily changed. She needed to examine why she was in such a precarious state, and therefore, she had to rip apart the “repressive” Stead family narrative. Karl and Kay could have helped. But, she writes, they refused to engage in what, for her, was a life-saving imperative.

Despite her aversion to close engagement with women, an issue addressed in the memoir, Grimshaw embarked upon a “white-knuckle ride” with a very good female psychiatrist, “so understanding and empathetic” she assisted the “agonising process” of unpacking the disconnect between her “private reality and the family line.”

Dr Sanders listened closely and spoke plainly: “Let’s call a spade a spade.” But Grimshaw also supplemented her sessions with an enormous amount of reading over a period of years, including case studies of narcissism, misogyny and mother-daughter relationships.

Her scrutiny is loving and even-handed, affirming the best qualities and good times she enjoyed with each parent. But she concludes that the tightly controlled order imposed within the Stead household (the “jam” incident is a must-read) was all surface. While Kay was prone to shrieking and silences, Karl employed rage, evidence, his wife thought, of “his genius”. His affairs were another source of anguish for the whole family.

Grimshaw could handle her father. But Kay’s affections, as her daughter became an adolescent, eluded her: “I wanted my mother to love me, and I desperately wanted to be good.” Instead, she recalls Kay and Karl repeatedly telling her she was bad. She began to behave accordingly, and it is heart-breaking to read.

Grimshaw divides the book into two sections, the first reflecting upon the anguished, danger-seeking persona she developed during her “bad” teen years and early 20s; the second devoted to the “adult Charlotte’s” careful façade as wife, mother and writer.

Now both have gone. “After a whole adult life, instead of remote and separated, I felt part of something,” she writes. “… Telling the true story had changed my brain.”

Some may wonder why Grimshaw is publishing this memoir while her parents are still alive. The Mirror Book asserts her power over her own life, and it contains an invitation to them to act before it’s too late.

“There’s no prospect of reconciliation, no … happy ending with the dead,” she concludes.

The new incarnation of Charlotte Grimshaw, who now wants to treasure the good things from her childhood, signs off with a memory of pure joy so beautifully expressed it brings a lump - the best kind - to the throat.

Reviewed by Linda Herrick