Catherine Taylor's book is less a memoir than it is a literary study of a kind of splitting. Throughout her account of a life growing up as a girl - in New Zealand and the UK - at a time when to be one seemed particularly fraught with heterosexually charged dangers and lusts, she slices into her narrative and changes it, shifts it from being one sort of story into another. "To start at the beginning, or at a beginning. The hourglass of our family had a few grains of sand left in it... The white sands of Mull... the black volcanic sands of New Zealand... Nothing could be known."
Born in Waikato in the late 60s, Taylor can't help but place the effect of that history in the very heart of her narrative and its result is to feel that one is not so much reading an autobiography as experiencing a constant flicker of light and dark, of here and there, of secrets and secrets shown. It's as though the country Taylor came from keeps turning off and on its light, casting bright shadows everywhere she looks, causing a single scene to be cut right down through its middle to show both of its hemispheres. "The hot sun, the Pacific light... the air now chilly and smoky... We had travelled all the way across the world."
The Stirrings opens with a line from the German poet Christa Wolf: "The paths we really took are overlaid with paths we did not take ...", and so from the beginning we feel this writer to be fixing upon her text a perspective that looks back to her childhood and adolescence using the forward propulsion of her future as a journalist and writer.
This story is from the December 16-22, 2023 edition of New Zealand Listener.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the December 16-22, 2023 edition of New Zealand Listener.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The rest is history
Rest - both sleep and non-sleep - is essential to help our overstressed bodies and minds repair themselves. But many of us remain in a constant state of 'fight, flight or freeze'.
Right and power
Israel is profiting financially and extending its global technological influence in response to the October 7 massacre, says investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein.
Dolphins be damned
Is SailGP's future in this country really under threat because of an at-risk marine mammal?
Orwellian irony
Our thinking about one of the 20th century's best-known writers is being challenged by the 'smelly little truths' Anna Funder uncovered about George Orwell's marriage.
The alchemist
Talent and a little magic have taken state-house kid Moses Mackay to the heights of Italian opera. He's coming back to sprinkle some of his gold dust around.
Good Lord, he was scandalous
Lord Byron still fascinates 200 years after his death, but more for his bohemian lifestyle than his poetry.
Stars in their eyes
Debut novel a heady mix of grief, astronomy and love.
Dark matter
Ngaio Marsh-style whodunnit set among academia attached to the Mt John Observatory.
Mirren's mirror on Meir
Dame Helen talks about playing Golda Meir, Israel's iron lady, during a pivotal chapter in the controversial politician's long career.
Game, set and match
Love, sex and great tennis take centre court in this highly charged drama.