Review: Hiding Places, by Lynley Edmeades

'How can writing exemplify the act of living and thinking and being and doing? How can writing be doing rather than done?'

I love a book with an interesting form, and this one ticked all the boxes. I read Hiding Places in two sittings over one rainy Wellington Sunday, compelled by its bite-sized digressions, stories, extracts and observations.

‘It’s not what she says but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath,’ the narrator says, and ‘how she says it’ forms the basis of this book. Woven through with ‘stories’, as well as excerpts from a 1913 childcare manual, found poems, responses to other texts and the lovely letters to ‘K’, this hybrid text creates a real/not-real, me/not me structure of suggestion and reference – a way of talking about what matters to us most, but telling it slant. And the result is rich, complex, skittish and intelligent.

Part memoir, part notebook, there is much reflection on the making of the book itself, a record of creative process. The form is fragmented, an unstructure that allows its content to unfurl organically: ‘I want it to be unwieldy, a ‘female text’ to use Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s word. I want to un-hide my mess.’

‘I can’t carry you and the baby and all the other stuff so hurry up,’ the character in one of the stories says, and I can’t help but think that this is one of the seminal sentences of the book. The difficulty of marrying the many roles women hold into some unified whole is a constant theme in the work and one I relate to. The impossibility of this being a smooth process is highlighted in the fragmented, fissured form, though the writing itself is fluid.

I particularly enjoyed the letters to ‘K’, imagined conversations with the author Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts – ‘a novel that is a notebook about trying to write a novel’ – that seems to speak to what Edmeades is doing here. ‘Dear K, begins one letter, and ends with ‘It will be a book about mothers and becoming a mother and how we all fail. Bye for now.’

Motherhood is one of the important hinges Hiding Places levers from – books about ‘mothercraft’ with their (often dodgy) advice, the experience of becoming a mother, sometimes channeled through conversations with her therapist (called ‘T’ in the book), ‘stories’ about ‘her’ (the mother/narrator) as well as reflections on ideas of motherhood and creativity and how the two intersect. ‘She is talking about writing, but she could be talking about her mother. His mother. All the mothers.’

The tension between an academic/writing career and being a new mother is illuminated in the excerpt ‘…women ought not to be given an academic education after the onset of puberty …Preparation for motherhood but equips girls for adult life’ and ‘Who the hell wishes Virginia Woolf had babies instead of books?’ and reaches its emotional crescendo in the quiet and heart-wrenching lines (spoken by the narrator’s young son): ‘I feel sad of daycare, the boy says. I feel scared sometimes of daycare.’

But there is humour too, dark and dry, scattered throughout the book:

'Older mother to new mother: I wish you wouldn’t cut your hair short like that. Older mother to new mother: I prefer your hair longer. Older mother to acquaintances in a café with new mother and baby: She doesn’t normally have her hair this short.'

And

'Dear K Will you be my mother? Thanks in advance. Regards'

In Hiding Places, Edmeades experiments with a ‘new poetics’ that may be able to hold the conflated experience of motherhood, writing, creativity, reading, relationships and mental health. And not to ‘only’ hold all those things but to describe the experience of those things, creating a book that encompasses process, a finished work about the aspects of a life which are ever-evolving.

The best thing about it, she tells T afterwards, was a feeling of wanting to fictionalize it, to write that world into stories. It’s all so rich, says the bad mother; all that unspokenness and indirection.’