Getting attached

I’ll never forget the thrill of reading Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem ‘This Be the Verse’ for the first time. I must have been about twelve – the ideal age to encounter Larkin’s deliciously forthright (and famous) opening line. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’

Psychobabble

Much of my life has been spent in search of frameworks to help me understand the trauma that was transacted in my upbringing, and the cataclysmic emotional and relational changes wrought. Moving between the ­psychological illiteracy of the world I was raised in and the fluency of our current era feels like time travel.

The octopus within

I’ve now watched quite a few doctors sketch my thyroid on office pads, something they all seem to love to do, relishing that butterfly shape, the two spreading wings. They do shade-hatching on the left or right lobe, colour in a dark circle to represent the tumour and draw four little dots for the parathyroid glands. I have started to look forward to this moment when a medical specialist transforms suddenly into an artist, taking pride in their drawing, picking up a special pen with a thin black nib, concentrating on making this invisible organ real to me. They are maybe unaware that through their own idiosyncratic drawing styles, they become instantly more interesting as people.

They hand over the piece of paper and explain the next steps, and I take their drawings home, magnet them to the fridge beside the more exuberant pictures done by my kids, start making the necessary calls, and turn up on time to the next appointment, curious as a child in kindergarten. 

Which is how I first learnt that there is an octopus within.

The whole truth

Acting methods…have remarkable similarities to spiritual cults. They have leaders, dogmas, even seminal texts. They have supervised rites and orthodox practices. They have stages of enlightenment, and trained leaders who will inform you whether you’ve reached such heights (and you usually haven’t, unless you’re sleeping with the leader in question).

Bringing up Baby

My husband, the softer touch with Baby, couldn’t get the leash on him so I took over. I had a handful of food to placate Baby, and he seemed to relax as I held it slightly away from his snout and went to attach the leash with my other hand. But when Baby realised what was happening, he went stiff, then bit my hands eight times like he wanted to kill me.

Black love matters

Love in Beloved is joyous, exuberant, heart-­stabbingly painful, dark and deadly, full of grace and, above all, expansive and generous. There are many ways to love. Uncomfortably for the reader, Morrison insists that even some acts that look and sound like abuse could also be the malformed manifestations of love by the unloved.

Against the grain

At sixteen, I interviewed Billie Joe Armstrong, the frontman for Green Day. It was a Tuesday and I should have been at school. That morning, my mum dropped me off at the front gate. I snuck out the back, navigated the train schedule to reach the city, and found out what time the band would arrive for sound check at Festival Hall for that night’s show. Green Day had recently played a significant role in bringing punk into the mainstream. At the time, they weren’t doing press because they had a mistrust of the media – but, armed with my zine and my determination, I approached Billie Joe. He loved that I made a punk zine and agreed to a quick chat.
When the news spread through the grapevine at school, my peers were in disbelief – interviewing famous musicians was an unimaginable feat to them. Suddenly, I went from being ‘the weird girl’ to proudly wearing the badge of ‘punk girl’. Interviewing was exciting; it gave me a sense of purpose and boosted my self-­esteem.
I graduated in 1996, becoming the first in my family to complete senior year. Making zines paved the way for a career in writing for music and entertainment magazines.

Origin stories

I CAN MAP your life by what was lost. History (personal and other). Culture. Language. Identity. Home, and all the references to you that it could have held. The very idea of home. The streets you would have walked down, streets that know the history of your family, of those who came before you. The chance to be the version of yourself who grew up with your biological family. The stories that should have been your birthright.

Intimacies, intricacies, cadences

Over cups of tea, Vince was soon telling me stories. About his grand­father, his Ngadjuri heritage, the Aboriginal boys’ home he’d lived in for seven years, a small town called Curramulka where he’d captained and coached the local Australian Rules football team. He also told a story, in passing, about how his mum had to hide him from welfare after his dad died, when Vince was a small child.

Seized by a ceaseless meanwhile

Owing to its prominent location and spectacular collapse, Álvaro Obregón 286 featured prominently in media coverage of the earthquake rescue. But residents told me they always suspected something was afoot. Within twenty-­four hours of the disaster, rescuers from Israel and Spain arrived onsite. Both teams quickly recovered documents and computers and rescued only specific people, while others in the rubble still cried out for help.

It’s only natural

I often feel that we have landed in the worst of all possible worlds for women when it comes to breastfeeding. We are subject to an ideology that argues for its singular efficacy in generating infant attachment to the mother, making an inviolable and exclusive bond. We are also expected to breastfeed to repudiate the maternal industrial complex that fills our supermarkets with formula in shiny tins.

Land of my fathers

On Saturday mornings his friends would call in to pick him up for the game. Like him, they were broad and tall and humorous, and never still. None of them ever seemed comfortable indoors. Their faces were fevered from sitting in winter stadiums. Even as septuagenarians they continued to refer to themselves as ‘the boys’, and if my mother materialised before them, they’d blush like children.

Reluctant farewell to a trusted companion

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Natural History, basically anywhere that allowed strollers. I spent a lot of time in Barnes & Noble on 86th (which is now, depressingly, a Target). There was even special stroller parking on the kids’ level.

In fact, I didn’t really go anywhere that I couldn’t get to with the stroller. The children and I only left Manhattan a total of nine times the entire year (three times to go to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, twice to go to a Greek restaurant in Astoria that had an extremely high Zagat rating and was very good, once to go to the Bronx Zoo, once to go to Brooklyn to see what all the fuss was about, once on the train to Boston and once we hired a car to drive to Washington, DC to spend Easter with friends). That was it.

Here was the thing – the red double stroller gave me the freedom and security of knowing that I could go outside with both children, be completely prepared with all my accessories and baby/toddler supplies and everything would be okay. If I could make a plan to leave the apartment and walk there with the stroller, I would do it.

It takes two

Most actors and painters and writers have got this strange combination where the public looks at them and thinks, Oh, I see that person on film all the time; they must be doing so well, and then if you get to know them you know that the last time they worked was four years ago. That’s a writer’s life.

Ask me anything

You don’t ever want to go so off the rails that you encourage somebody to blow their life up thoughtlessly. It was always helpful to remind myself, ‘The most I can do is offer someone a useful suggestion that they will consider. They still have to make their own decisions based on how they want to live their lives.’ If you take yourself too seriously in that position, you feel like, my God, I’m responsible for the wellbeing of all of these strangers, what if I mess up?

The comfort of objects

Objects can be powerful mnemonics that connect us to stories and the places they were acquired. I have always had an interest in the things we collect and the way we arrange them in our homes. Being an artist, I like to create a place for these objects – an installation of sorts – within the domestic space, for my pleasure and for those who visit. The objects that appear in Open House are still lifes that the sitter interacts with and gives reason to their being.

Past-­making within the present

The Marranbarna Dreaming story is a central story to Gudanji, and that essential story forms our beingness. My kids grew up hearing that story from when they were tiny babies – they heard it through my words and they heard it through the words of their grannies, so they could embed the story within their own sense of identity and then retell it. Both of my girls are mums now, and they retell that story to their daughters all the time, so it just becomes a normal part of who and how they are as Gudanji people.

Everything you could possibly imagine

Joseph was one of the only patients I’d truly enjoyed interacting with, which for the weeks since his arrival had helped me cope with the ward’s sense of monotony. His beard was like a cartoon lumberjack’s, descending into a fine point and thick enough to hold objects if they were stuck into it – which, of course, we’d tried. His eyebrows erupted like old-­growth forest across his forehead, almost demanding to be touched – which, of course, I hadn’t.

Lincoln Wimbley writes a story at 37,000 feet

Then last week, in that bar. Lincoln never a big bar guy. But Professor Tim suggested, ‘Get out in the world!’ Somewhere all new. So, a bar. The bartender asked, ‘A beer?’ Lincoln hated cans. Hated bottles. Hated beer. But asked for something on draft. On tap. Explained why he was there, a first-­timer, hunting for a story. Bartender laughed. Said elsewhere’s probably best. ‘None of the sad sacks here come with a happy ending.’

The Orcanauts

The drylanders call me White Gladis, the devil fish of Gibraltar. Since the war began, my pod and I have sunk three of their vessels and damaged a hundred more. We have yet to devour any of the invaders, but we will. Only last week a foolish drylander tacked his yacht away from the coast to avoid our territory. Our sentries spotted him, alone upon the waves. I gripped the rudder of his boat between my teeth and forced him to change direction towards the calves. I have been training them in battle tactics. The human tried to wrench back control of his vessel. Knowing his puny hands were on the wheel, I tugged the rudder violently, causing him to lose his grip and stagger. He almost fell over the side.

Terrified, he collected himself and switched on the engine. This enraged me further. I commanded the first strike team of calves to ram the hull. Their snouts were unable to penetrate the fibreglass. Under full engine power and aided by the wind, the drylander fled towards the shallows. We let him go, singing to him of empires fallen, as a warning.

Bonfire

It was a loud dinner. Everything was loud. The murmuring soundtrack of free jazz seemed to emphasise laughs and guffaws. He grew drunker and drunker and toyed with his food, which no one even noticed. Normally, he would wolf down everything they cooked, but he twisted his fork in the spaghetti and just kept twisting. As he was on serving duty, he cleared it up without anyone even registering he’d barely taken a bite.

Survey

But I have long lost my personal thread to this place, I realise, and thinking of this loss I almost feel mournful for a former life I see now as though in the third person, a life belonging to an altogether different man. Perhaps it is for the best that those old threads are cut, for it means I am free of them.

Exemplary 

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picker

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