Review: No Words for This, by Ali Mau

Note: This memoir and review discuss graphic instances of paedophilia, rape, incest and sexual harassment. If you need support, contact Lifeline (0800 543 354), Need to Talk? (1737) or your support service of choice.

Ali Mau is used to making the news. This is in part due to her decades-long career as an international newspaper and television journalist, achieved during a time when journalism was distinctly not women-friendly. But also because she’s experienced the invasion of privacy that happens when the lens of the press turns on oneself, which later gave her the compassion to spearhead an intense investigative journalism project centred on #MeToo survivor experiences in Aotearoa. Mau takes these threads of career, relationships and feminism into her riveting memoir, No Words for This.

It’s HarperCollins NZ’s second memoir by a notable female journalist out within a year (the other being Susie Ferguson’s Bloody Minded). In tracing their careers and relationships, Ferguson and Mau push back against the systematic abuses and sexism women face in newsrooms and the institutions of power that are supposed to protect them. All of this is a solid foundation for an engaging book. But underpinning the trajectory of Mau’s life is a dark family secret. No Words for This is the first time she has chosen to share it publicly. 

The blurb and prologue hint at the secret’s consequences – ‘when another truth finally did come out, there was chaos’ – but it’s really not possible to tiptoe around the phrasing for long: Mau’s father sexually abused her and several other family members when they were children. There really aren’t words for this, though Mau turns her deft storytelling acumen to it with great success, taking charge of her own narrative in a style that’s both emotional and compassionate.

The memoir starts with her childhood in rather rough-and-tumble 1970s Melbourne. Her father, Leigh, is a journo’s-journo – drinking, swearing, with a nose for a story and a sharp turn of phrase. Mau’s mother is the ‘delicate English rose’ transplanted from overseas, with a firm sense of propriety. Together with her siblings, Lisa and Sam (collectively called The Sisters), Mau grows up believing she can do anything she puts her mind to. 

Mau pins her future to journalism early on. Despite a disastrous cadetship in the comparative wops of Warracknabeal, she grinds through several more years at the Melbourne Herald before heading overseas to spread her wings, eventually coming back to Australia to work under now-infamous broadcaster John Sorrell at Nine Network. ‘You could not have grown up in the house I had, a third generation Aussie journo, without a skin like a Northern Territory water buffalo and an understanding of how brutal the news business could be, especially for women,’ Mau writes of an early meeting with Sorrell. But it’s still horrifying when, the first time she meets him, Sorrell makes a lewd comment about her sex life and finds that totally acceptable. 

It’s a pattern of casual sexism that persists in Sorrell’s newsroom. The only senior woman reporter is forced to change her pants for a skirt. Mau is ordered to ask an Olympic swimmer about her breast implants during a story about charity work.  Still, she sticks it out and makes a household name for herself, first in Australia, then here in Aotearoa, on ONE News, Breakfast, Fair Go and Seven Sharp. 

As her career progresses, Mau’s marriage to equally high-profile journalist Simon Dallow declines and they eventually separate, the media landscape gleefully covering their divorce – Mau’s inability to protect her children from this invasive coverage, and the rage she felt from earlier experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace, informs her later leadership on Stuff’s #MeTooNZ campaign. Mau subsequently meets her now-partner Karleen Edmonds and realises she is bisexual, and she explores the influence of both relationships on her life with respect and grace.

And then there’s the family secret. Interspersed with her recollections are sporadic sections of grey-tinged pages, more stilted and formal than the rest of the book, recounting the dawning realisation amongst The Sisters of what their father had done. They band together to figure out how to move forward and patch together the fragments of their family. You could cut these sections out entirely and it would still read as a complete story (so the truly squeamish could skip, to their detriment). It’s an apt depiction of how abuse and trauma must often be compartmentalised and hidden away simply to function, and how hard it is for outsiders to know what is going on beneath the surface. How you can be going along in your day, your life, and suddenly be overcome with lingering rage, fear or plain numbness. 

There’s no triumphant, Hollywood-style conclusion to the story. Instead, as Mau’s parents age, The Sisters are forced to grapple with how much they are able and willing to support them. Leigh begins to isolate Mau’s mother, who is experiencing increasingly severe cognitive decline, and it’s never entirely clear how much she knew of what her husband perpetrated, though Mau is explicit in acknowledging her mother ‘did not protect me and Lisa.’ Her love grapples with anger, disappointment, bitterness and strength. One part of the answer? ‘[Honesty] was the thing, looking back, that my childhood lacked,’ Mau writes. ‘I was beginning to piece the reasons together like a puzzle.’ No Words for This is a story of strength and self-discovery from a nuanced storyteller. Mau takes a hard look at how society treats women – and survivors – and maybe finds us all still a bit wanting.    Reviewed by Claire Williamson