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Second Half First
Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her fortieth birthday, in Second Half First Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the experiences of the past thirty years that have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived.
From a childhood in England, and her parents' difficult marriage, to her time as a young newlywed living with her husband in Papua New Guinea; arriving as a single woman in Sydney in the 1970s and building close friendships with writers such as Helen Garner, with whom she lived in the bookish ‘house on the corner', and the lovers who would – sometimes briefly – derail her, to returning to Papua thirty years later to found a literacy program, this new book by Drusilla Modjeska is an intensely personal and moving account of an examined life.
In asking the candid questions that so many of us face - about love and independence, the death of a partner, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family - Drusilla Modjeska reassesses parts of her life, her work, the importance to her of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others. The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest; the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky's Lunch have been waiting for.
From a childhood in England, and her parents' difficult marriage, to her time as a young newlywed living with her husband in Papua New Guinea; arriving as a single woman in Sydney in the 1970s and building close friendships with writers such as Helen Garner, with whom she lived in the bookish ‘house on the corner', and the lovers who would – sometimes briefly – derail her, to returning to Papua thirty years later to found a literacy program, this new book by Drusilla Modjeska is an intensely personal and moving account of an examined life.
In asking the candid questions that so many of us face - about love and independence, the death of a partner, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family - Drusilla Modjeska reassesses parts of her life, her work, the importance to her of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others. The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest; the book that readers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky's Lunch have been waiting for.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2015
9 people are currently reading
159 people want to read
About the author
Drusilla Modjeska
26 books49 followersDrusilla Modjeska was born in England and lived in Papua New Guinea before arriving in Australia in 1971. She studied at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales completing a PhD which was published as Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (1981).
Modjeska's writing often explores the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The best known of her work are Poppy (1990), a fictionalised biography of her mother, and Stravinsky's Lunch (2001), a feminist reappraisal of the lives and work of Australian painters Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. She has also edited several volumes of stories, poems and essays, including the work of Lesbia Harford and a 'Focus on Papua New Guinea' issue for the literary magazine Meanjin.
In 2006 she was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, "investigating the interplay of race, gender and the arts in post-colonial Papua New Guinea".
Modjeska's writing often explores the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. The best known of her work are Poppy (1990), a fictionalised biography of her mother, and Stravinsky's Lunch (2001), a feminist reappraisal of the lives and work of Australian painters Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith. She has also edited several volumes of stories, poems and essays, including the work of Lesbia Harford and a 'Focus on Papua New Guinea' issue for the literary magazine Meanjin.
In 2006 she was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, "investigating the interplay of race, gender and the arts in post-colonial Papua New Guinea".
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
November 30, 2015
A lovely memoir, covering the roughly 30 years of Modjeska's life since she turned 40 and broke up with a long-term partner. The book reads as though you're having a long and slightly rambling conversation, following threads as they come up and covering lots of disparate ground (writing, love, feminism, children, PNG, grief, art, family, travel, death and on and on and on). The writing is easy and beautiful and Modjeska is a lovely story-teller. Excellent.
January 1, 2016
This elegantly written memoir (of sorts) was sometimes deeply compelling, at other times rather distant and reserved. Throughout, Modjeska confounded my expectations about what I expect a memoir to be, but overall it was a very rewarding read. I wanted more of the personal stuff (of course!) rather than the weaving in of bits and pieces of famous lives we've read about elsewhere (Woolf, artists and writers from her previous biographies etc) but this effect makes sense given her life's work has been to understand how women juggle independence/ art with the rest of it. She left me feeling optimistic about the 'second half' of life and this is no small thing, especially for women.
February 5, 2022
I really loved the first half of this, which read like Olivia Laing or Deborah Levy, like a series of conversations with a smart older woman about the time when she was my age. I’m interested in books about middle age right now because I’m about to turn 40. But I got very lost in the second half, not quite following what was happening at all and who all the people were she was discussing.
November 13, 2015
Drusilla Modjeska's generous and beautifully written memoir feels like it is being written as you read it, questioning itself as it goes. That immediacy is a large part of its charm. Another is the way it transcends the limits of autobiography, delivering effortless insights to its readers beyond the writer's own experience.
It charts Drusilla's 40s, 50s and 60s, between England, Australia and Papua New Guinea, between tradition and modernity, loving men and being independent of men, grieving and creating, being vulnerable and asserting strength, reading to make sense of the world and writing to make sense of the self. It's great writing that isn't afraid of ambiguity.
And how marvellous that a book about feminism, female friendships, writing and making art should be so easily relevant and meaningful to this reader, a man who is neither a writer nor an artist. This is a moving book about the getting of wisdom, written with a surprisingly potent mix of humility and authority, which is more concerned with "living the questions" than finding (or imparting) the answers.
Highly recommended.
It charts Drusilla's 40s, 50s and 60s, between England, Australia and Papua New Guinea, between tradition and modernity, loving men and being independent of men, grieving and creating, being vulnerable and asserting strength, reading to make sense of the world and writing to make sense of the self. It's great writing that isn't afraid of ambiguity.
And how marvellous that a book about feminism, female friendships, writing and making art should be so easily relevant and meaningful to this reader, a man who is neither a writer nor an artist. This is a moving book about the getting of wisdom, written with a surprisingly potent mix of humility and authority, which is more concerned with "living the questions" than finding (or imparting) the answers.
Highly recommended.
August 2, 2016
I was lent this by a friend who probably thinks my retired brain is a bit dull and stagnant, so I tackled this enthusiastically. Nup, got to the end of the first section and realised I wasn't the slightest bit interested. However, Modjeska is a lovely writer and her language in this memoir is well up to scratch which is why I have given it 3 stars and I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the ins and outs of a duck's (Drusilla's) a-hole. Me?? Sorry, couldn't care less and I don't want to die knowing the last book I read was boring, I want exciting......
So it is on the floor and I moved on.
So it is on the floor and I moved on.
December 16, 2015
This is one of the best memoir books I have read. I loved the questions she asked, examined, then presented ideas which often posed more questions which I found so fluid and inclusive of me (the reader). I am the same age as the author and have led a very different life but somehow I understood her journey as if I was walking with her. I was jealous of her time shared with Helen, Lynne Segal and many others that she has 'hung out' with and I have admired from a distance and devoured their writings. Would have loved to share the tea, wine and conversations.
March 29, 2016
A wonderful gift to a reader. So many strands as illustrated by the sculpture on the cover. The gift of wise reflection on the writer's life from age 40 until 2014 ( age 68). Themes include feminism, writing, UK to Oz, lovers, grief especially after the loss of parents, friends, family, visual art and PNG.
June 5, 2016
Second Half First moves across continents discussing lovers, parents, family, friends, literature, art, depression and death. It is about a women determined to write and the challenges she faces. It is a beautiful, profound, candid memoir.
December 9, 2016
Goddamn, Drusilla Modjeska. I seemed to spend most of my reading time being annoyed, the meandering structure; the assumptions of a shared culture (especially literary) and world; the way that the author is the only figure who ever seems to come into focus. I spend my time thinking "oh well, maybe this isn't my book right now". And yet, I find myself laying it aside reluctantly, and once I have, continuing to let it do it's meandering thing around in my brain. Finishing the book, I feel both enriched and a little desolate, not yet willing to let my sojourn in her world end right now. I have no idea how she manages this, to be honest, given how unassuming the words on the page seem to be.
For me, reading, more than any other activity, is a way to create the self. When I walk out my front door, I have limited control over what will happen and what I will experience, but with reading a make a choice as to what ideas to expose myself too, what rhythms to think in, what perspectives to consider. It is hardly a surprise that studies show that reading can significantly shift your empathy, change your capacity to think and the way we respond to experience. The particular style of personal, and intellectual intertwining that Modjeska excels at, that she so admires in Woolf, Lessing and Beauvoir, that was so much influenced by and influencing of, feminism, makes for an intensely personal reading experience, as if you are in mental dialogue with a person who half exists, is half made up, leading inevitably to a meditation on the similarities and the differences in lives, perspectives, feelings.
Modjeska is firmly of my mother's generation, being only a few months older. Throughout my adolescence, these crew of feminist writers - Modjeska; Hazel Rowley; Lynne Segal; Robyn Archer - loomed large as fierce warriors creating a new world. My mother and her friends read them, discussed them, and she gave me their books to read. It is strange, on some level, to read of the reality of their lives at this point, living in the same Sydney terrace houses in the same suburbs I would move to a decade later, having much the same experiences with lovers and facing the same dilemmas around sexual freedom in a still sexist world.
Other reverberations were more painful, Modjeska deliberately writes sparingly of the emotional landscape of a lover with severe mental illness, hinting and skirting around an anguish that is complicated, and somehow unfair. There is brute honesty in this, as in all parts of the book, and a willingness to look at the self unflinchingly, which should not be confused with the illusion of seeing clearly.
The themes that resonated the loudest for me, however, at this moment in time in my life, were those of this intergenerational community of women, who have so transformed our lives. I am so struck, reading this, by how different our mothers' lives were from their mothers, and also, in different ways, from our own. Modjeska looks to her mothers' generation as agents of dramatic change, in much the same way as I view the Baby Boomer feminists. And both are true. In a matter of a few generations, the lives that women in the West can expect to live have expanded greatly. From childcare, maternity leave, equal pay have sprung enormous cultural changes, and we now have such a revolution in the understanding of gendered violence, although the violence is with us still, the cultural shift in criminalising and condemning sexual harassment, 'date' and marital rape is enormous. The emergence of terms such as 'mansplaining' (I must admit to preferring Modjeska and her crew's similar-but-not-identical shorthand of "Greenwich Mean Time" to describe the automatic assumption of those with privilege that their perspective is the norm) reveal a greater shift, that recognises the right of women to respect. None of these changes happened without women who made them happen, who pushed back on boundaries, and refused to believe that their personal lives were not matters of politics. Our connections with each other are messy and personal, because women's lives and struggles are messy and personal. And it is, in large part, through reading that we conduct dialogues over the breach, supplementing the conversations about the politics of living female that we have with our friends, our mothers and aunts, and our daughters and nieces. There is a wonderful Australianess to this perspective as well, it is fascinating to me that Modjeska, coming so late to this country, has a literary world bounded by Stead and Noonuccal, more than Woolf or Wollstonecraft. I am grateful, reading this, to have been of a generation that I think, does not have to choose so hard between the space to think and create, and love and intimacy, while also being aware of how much of that need remains, for women to push back against the myriad of personal expectations - from being a carer of our families through to being tolerant of being patronised and harassed - that are placed, in order to have intellectual space
Mostly, it left with an overwhelming urge to read Woolf, someone I have attempted for decades. So we'll see how that goes.
For me, reading, more than any other activity, is a way to create the self. When I walk out my front door, I have limited control over what will happen and what I will experience, but with reading a make a choice as to what ideas to expose myself too, what rhythms to think in, what perspectives to consider. It is hardly a surprise that studies show that reading can significantly shift your empathy, change your capacity to think and the way we respond to experience. The particular style of personal, and intellectual intertwining that Modjeska excels at, that she so admires in Woolf, Lessing and Beauvoir, that was so much influenced by and influencing of, feminism, makes for an intensely personal reading experience, as if you are in mental dialogue with a person who half exists, is half made up, leading inevitably to a meditation on the similarities and the differences in lives, perspectives, feelings.
Modjeska is firmly of my mother's generation, being only a few months older. Throughout my adolescence, these crew of feminist writers - Modjeska; Hazel Rowley; Lynne Segal; Robyn Archer - loomed large as fierce warriors creating a new world. My mother and her friends read them, discussed them, and she gave me their books to read. It is strange, on some level, to read of the reality of their lives at this point, living in the same Sydney terrace houses in the same suburbs I would move to a decade later, having much the same experiences with lovers and facing the same dilemmas around sexual freedom in a still sexist world.
Other reverberations were more painful, Modjeska deliberately writes sparingly of the emotional landscape of a lover with severe mental illness, hinting and skirting around an anguish that is complicated, and somehow unfair. There is brute honesty in this, as in all parts of the book, and a willingness to look at the self unflinchingly, which should not be confused with the illusion of seeing clearly.
The themes that resonated the loudest for me, however, at this moment in time in my life, were those of this intergenerational community of women, who have so transformed our lives. I am so struck, reading this, by how different our mothers' lives were from their mothers, and also, in different ways, from our own. Modjeska looks to her mothers' generation as agents of dramatic change, in much the same way as I view the Baby Boomer feminists. And both are true. In a matter of a few generations, the lives that women in the West can expect to live have expanded greatly. From childcare, maternity leave, equal pay have sprung enormous cultural changes, and we now have such a revolution in the understanding of gendered violence, although the violence is with us still, the cultural shift in criminalising and condemning sexual harassment, 'date' and marital rape is enormous. The emergence of terms such as 'mansplaining' (I must admit to preferring Modjeska and her crew's similar-but-not-identical shorthand of "Greenwich Mean Time" to describe the automatic assumption of those with privilege that their perspective is the norm) reveal a greater shift, that recognises the right of women to respect. None of these changes happened without women who made them happen, who pushed back on boundaries, and refused to believe that their personal lives were not matters of politics. Our connections with each other are messy and personal, because women's lives and struggles are messy and personal. And it is, in large part, through reading that we conduct dialogues over the breach, supplementing the conversations about the politics of living female that we have with our friends, our mothers and aunts, and our daughters and nieces. There is a wonderful Australianess to this perspective as well, it is fascinating to me that Modjeska, coming so late to this country, has a literary world bounded by Stead and Noonuccal, more than Woolf or Wollstonecraft. I am grateful, reading this, to have been of a generation that I think, does not have to choose so hard between the space to think and create, and love and intimacy, while also being aware of how much of that need remains, for women to push back against the myriad of personal expectations - from being a carer of our families through to being tolerant of being patronised and harassed - that are placed, in order to have intellectual space
Mostly, it left with an overwhelming urge to read Woolf, someone I have attempted for decades. So we'll see how that goes.
January 24, 2017
It was only to be expected that the author of the ground-breaking Poppy would confound expectations of the form of her own memoir. The memoir of her mother was experimental in form, filling gaps in the historical record with questions and imaginative reconstructions that treated her mother’s life with respect. In Second Half First, Modjeska subverts chronology and focusses as much on place and on literature as she does on people. It’s very interesting to read.
Beginning the memoir at a pivotal moment in her life – turning 40, breaking up with a long-term partner just as she was entertaining tentative thoughts about a child with him, Modjeska explores without self-pity the twists and turns of her life. She is one of that generation of women who were role models for women like me: a little older; and a good deal more high profile in terms of career; and forging through the stuffy conservatism of post war Australia to make it a more exciting place. Modjeska didn’t need a #ReadWomen hashtag to get reviewed in the major dailies: her books were part of mainstream conversations from the moment they were in print. But in middle age, she had to confront the tangle of her personal life. Her mother had died and she had hoped that a child could assuage her grief. It was not to be, and feminism had not prepared her for the emotional cost of some of the choices she had made.
Scraping back the layers of her life with disarming honesty, she tells us how The House on the Corner was more than just a place to live. It was interesting to see the disdain with which Modjeska describes suburban living and the concept of the family home, because her concept of communal living as a supportive home base is so different to mine. Simultaneously reading Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police I understand why some feminists think that we need to reinvent family life in the suburbs, but I have found a great sense of community in my patch of the suburbs. As an incorrigible introvert, I would find the idea of communal living to be a sustained form of torture.
But it seems to have suited Modjeska.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/24/s...
Beginning the memoir at a pivotal moment in her life – turning 40, breaking up with a long-term partner just as she was entertaining tentative thoughts about a child with him, Modjeska explores without self-pity the twists and turns of her life. She is one of that generation of women who were role models for women like me: a little older; and a good deal more high profile in terms of career; and forging through the stuffy conservatism of post war Australia to make it a more exciting place. Modjeska didn’t need a #ReadWomen hashtag to get reviewed in the major dailies: her books were part of mainstream conversations from the moment they were in print. But in middle age, she had to confront the tangle of her personal life. Her mother had died and she had hoped that a child could assuage her grief. It was not to be, and feminism had not prepared her for the emotional cost of some of the choices she had made.
Scraping back the layers of her life with disarming honesty, she tells us how The House on the Corner was more than just a place to live. It was interesting to see the disdain with which Modjeska describes suburban living and the concept of the family home, because her concept of communal living as a supportive home base is so different to mine. Simultaneously reading Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police I understand why some feminists think that we need to reinvent family life in the suburbs, but I have found a great sense of community in my patch of the suburbs. As an incorrigible introvert, I would find the idea of communal living to be a sustained form of torture.
But it seems to have suited Modjeska.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/24/s...
May 19, 2017
As an undergraduate student of Literature, Drusilla Modjeska was always on the required reading list. She was so clever and wonderful that I think, back then, I never thought of her as just human. This memoir confirmed her cleverness, and her elegant writing style, but revealed her realness too. Mistakes with men, uncertainties, insecurities, and personal tragedies are revealed with humility. This woman is amazing, her achievements are great, but it was her doubts and her warmth that I most enjoyed while reading this. Modjeska ponders the female dilemma of achieving both independence and love, the eternal yes/no, and where a creative life fits into all of that. She unflinchingly confronts the judgements society makes of women, especially the childless, and questions how far we've really come. Modjeska is restrained - she's not old yet and the people in her life are mostly still alive. For that reason, it seems that she keeps the reader at arm's length and so you never really feel that you're being told a whole story. I loved the honesty with which she approached the eternal question of why great women so often end up with shitty men. Her reflections were so relatable, particularly about the loneliness that is peculiar to very long relationships. I felt like I was reading something new about life when I read this. Recommended to literature fans.
May 6, 2018
Excellent memoir, beautifully written and thought provoking content. The exploration of lifelong questions through the narrative of memory, reflection and the contemplation of other authors & artists, both contemporaries and preceding. This is the second book of Modjeska that I’ve read, ‘The Mountain’ being the first, and I found it incredibly insightful to read of her real experiences and connection to PNG. It gave only further strength to the credibility of that novel and my personal respect an admiration for Modjeska in all her facets, as an author, artist, feminist, women, lover and friend.
December 2, 2019
I loved Drusilla Modjeska's book The Mountain, but I just couldn't get into this one. Had to stop after about 100 pages.
Read
March 16, 2017LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book, esp. the meandering voice.
Read
November 30, 2015Originally published on A Biographer in Perth
Before I started reading Drusilla Modjeska’s Second Half First, my father-in-law asked me what it was about, and I couldn’t give a good answer about what I expected. Modjeska herself has some trouble with this when she meets her old lover late in the book and explains it isn’t just about him, even though he’d triggered it, “It’s about a whole lot of other things, my mother, psychoanalysis, reading, writing, New Guinea, living away from where I was born.” (332) It’s a digressive book, rhizomatic, I suppose; tellingly, at one point Modjeska objects to another biographer who has “everything hammered into place.”
I think the first section, “The House on the Corner,” is the strongest, a long reflection on love, freedom, and men & women based around her years sharing the eponymous house with a number of other women, including Helen Garner and Hazel Rowley. It was uncanny how closely Modjeska’s reflections mirror my own reading this year, weaving in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (unfinished by my bed), Hazel Rowley’s biography of Stead (which I wrote a chapter of my thesis on), Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (Kindle tells me I’m 23% of the way through it), and the Adelaide Writers’ Week panel on biography in 1988 which I had also been reading about in my research. Yet while for me there is a distance between me and my subject, for Modjeska the field of biography is an existential enquiry into how women are to live their lives with both freedom (particularly to write but also freedom from marriage) and love. I also noticed how defining gender is for her and her circle, and how she depicts men and women as so different from each other. In my late-Gen X circles gender doesn’t seem as central to self-understanding. Perhaps this is naivete, perhaps progress, perhaps something else. I also believe in the potential of marriage to be good for men and women, to have its own freedoms and security. Modjeska doesn’t necessarily deny this, but after her early marriage ended she has chosen a very different way.
At one point Modjeska compares writing to psychoanalysis – “some small accrual of understanding, maybe, an expanding of a personal repertoire, a plunge into the darkness we harbour inside ourselves.” (171) The comparison seems apt, and also carries with it the need for distance from events, the years required to find a new angle on them. In the last section, “Now,” Modjeska doesn’t have that distance, and it suffers from it. It reads more like journalism to me, or the diaries she earlier notes are not the most reliable guide to someone’s life. Perhaps it’s also that the (worthy) theme of her humanitarian work in New Guinea held my interest less.
Before I started reading Drusilla Modjeska’s Second Half First, my father-in-law asked me what it was about, and I couldn’t give a good answer about what I expected. Modjeska herself has some trouble with this when she meets her old lover late in the book and explains it isn’t just about him, even though he’d triggered it, “It’s about a whole lot of other things, my mother, psychoanalysis, reading, writing, New Guinea, living away from where I was born.” (332) It’s a digressive book, rhizomatic, I suppose; tellingly, at one point Modjeska objects to another biographer who has “everything hammered into place.”
I think the first section, “The House on the Corner,” is the strongest, a long reflection on love, freedom, and men & women based around her years sharing the eponymous house with a number of other women, including Helen Garner and Hazel Rowley. It was uncanny how closely Modjeska’s reflections mirror my own reading this year, weaving in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (unfinished by my bed), Hazel Rowley’s biography of Stead (which I wrote a chapter of my thesis on), Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (Kindle tells me I’m 23% of the way through it), and the Adelaide Writers’ Week panel on biography in 1988 which I had also been reading about in my research. Yet while for me there is a distance between me and my subject, for Modjeska the field of biography is an existential enquiry into how women are to live their lives with both freedom (particularly to write but also freedom from marriage) and love. I also noticed how defining gender is for her and her circle, and how she depicts men and women as so different from each other. In my late-Gen X circles gender doesn’t seem as central to self-understanding. Perhaps this is naivete, perhaps progress, perhaps something else. I also believe in the potential of marriage to be good for men and women, to have its own freedoms and security. Modjeska doesn’t necessarily deny this, but after her early marriage ended she has chosen a very different way.
At one point Modjeska compares writing to psychoanalysis – “some small accrual of understanding, maybe, an expanding of a personal repertoire, a plunge into the darkness we harbour inside ourselves.” (171) The comparison seems apt, and also carries with it the need for distance from events, the years required to find a new angle on them. In the last section, “Now,” Modjeska doesn’t have that distance, and it suffers from it. It reads more like journalism to me, or the diaries she earlier notes are not the most reliable guide to someone’s life. Perhaps it’s also that the (worthy) theme of her humanitarian work in New Guinea held my interest less.
December 24, 2015
A personal memoir with the first segment exploring early feminist struggles between professional lives , marriage & family . Hand wringing , soul searching & intellectual debate seem have taken up an inordinate amount of time within Drusilla's circles whilst entrepreneurship & inventiveness feel somewhat lacking . Drusilla's love affair with Papua New Guinea is at the heart of the book and the key to my interest in her journey : her early years there with an anthropologist husband ; her in -between Project with the National Gallery of Victoria & Annandale Gallery (exhibiting stunning unknown textiles from remote jungle communities ) and finally her admirable current efforts to create Book Houses in illiterate villages where a thirst for educations seems to be totally ignored by a corrupt and inept government Failed love affairs abound . Men come and go ( one -at least , lasting two decades ) Women friends- for the most part - remain stalwart -despite geographical distance - and provide key support during a breast cancer episode requiring surgery . .I have met Drusilla , enjoyed 'Stravinsky's Lunch ' and know some of her friends / colleagues (artist Janet Laurence , curators and gallery directors amongst them ) The academic milieu feels deeply familiar to me too -although less and less attractive as my memories resurface ) The memoir ends with a 3 generation UK / Australian family gathering in Sydney . Drusilla sounds like a fabulous aunt and a thoughtful sister . She has made her home in the Antipodes and remains deeply connected to PNG . She will be remembered for her writing but -in my opinion -no more than for her work trudging painfully through jungle terrain in a country whose post colonial transition remains mired in violence ( particularly against women ) , corruption , exploitation and illiteracy . My daughter- in -law founded Among Equals - a PNG social enterprise business focussing on fashion friendly Bilum bags . I glimpse the issues via Caroline and am frankly horrified . #png #melanesia #drusillamodjeska #memoirs #amongequals #literature
April 28, 2016
I started this memoir some time ago and for various reasons had to put it aside for other reading. This made it hard for me to re-engage with the book but it gradually drew me in again. I'm a great admirer of Modjeska's work, much of which satisfyingly blurs distinctions between fact and fiction.
This memoir, written about the author's life from the age of 40, is both factual and exploratory. We follow Modjeska from 'the house on the corner' in Sydney where she met other writers and artists and began to feel at home in Australia, to England where she visited her dying father and finally to Papua New Guinea where she walked to a high mountain village to see bark fabric art. Each of the sections of the memoir reflect periods of her writing of other books so that is interesting in itself. At times I found the introspection a bit drawn out, but for the most part I delighted in her stories, insights and wisdom. Her language is beautiful - modulated and nuanced.
This memoir, written about the author's life from the age of 40, is both factual and exploratory. We follow Modjeska from 'the house on the corner' in Sydney where she met other writers and artists and began to feel at home in Australia, to England where she visited her dying father and finally to Papua New Guinea where she walked to a high mountain village to see bark fabric art. Each of the sections of the memoir reflect periods of her writing of other books so that is interesting in itself. At times I found the introspection a bit drawn out, but for the most part I delighted in her stories, insights and wisdom. Her language is beautiful - modulated and nuanced.
December 18, 2015
3.5. I got a bit confused. I guess the writer was trying to make the people in the story unidentifiable but I was just confused. She would mention a persons name without much explanation. I had no idea what relationship they had to her or why they were in her story. It did seem to jump around so not much coherence through it. Maybe it just needed better editing. And it wasn't so much a memoir as a series of essays. Lots of interesting information there but better editing would have been an improvement.
October 31, 2016
A very good, if sometimes difficult to read book. Replete with references to books and authors which I then felt the need to (re)read -- an urge I had to suppress. Among many other things, the book gives the backstory to the author's excellent novel The Mountain.
But the focus is on relationships: with friends, with lovers, with family. It is also an account of coping with loss and with grieving. Altogether a fascinating, if difficult and sometimes a little disjointed, book.
But the focus is on relationships: with friends, with lovers, with family. It is also an account of coping with loss and with grieving. Altogether a fascinating, if difficult and sometimes a little disjointed, book.
March 31, 2016
Parts of this memoir were enthralling to me - particularly the description of her early life as a writer and her contemplations of feminism, family, friendships, relationships. The energy of her writing dropped away in the second half, which is funny considering the title. Still very worthwhile reading.
June 18, 2016
I loved this book. As someone who has travelled to PNG many times, and also lived in Balmain, I could relate to Drusilla's story and the places of her life. I found it atmospheric, moving, honest, complex. Looking forward to reading all her other books.
July 25, 2016
This book surprised me. It's actually a very interesting and well written memoir, examine a writers life and her life on three continents. England, PNG and Australia. Covers many many issues relevant to most women's lives
November 10, 2015
wonderful!
Read
March 27, 2016Excellent. Loved it.
February 22, 2016
Listen to me chat about this book on Art Smitten if you wanna!
http://syn.org.au/common-reader-secon...
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couldn-t-finish
May 5, 2018Modjeska is a beautiful writer but I think this memoir may bore mw somewhat. I’m just not caring about what she has to say. Lovely voice though.
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