![]() She subsequently goes to the police, who are unbothered by her account of what happened. She chatters away, extricates herself, tells the man her boss will be looking for her. “‘A swim,’ I say, ‘that sounds nice.’” He answers by putting his binocular strap around her neck. She has “an instinct for the onset of violence”. ![]() Taking a break from work, she goes for a walk where she encounters a man on a mountainside who appears to be waiting for her. She describes how she gets beneath the skin of the people she tidies for (good apprenticeship for a novelist), learning that they are not always what they might seem from the traces left in bedrooms: fertility lists, jazzy paisley underwear, a silver whip for sexual adventures of an equestrian bent. Her first chapter is the most shocking – she is working at a “holistic alternative retreat” at the base of a mountain. But then she was – terrifyingly – unable to situate herself within the water, did not know how to surface because of childhood encephalitis: “I have impairment to a number of neurological functions, one of which is the ability to sense where things are or should be and my place among them.” For all her polish, she is at times uncertain how to orient herself in confessional prose too – another question of judging distance. She was bored, she wanted to escape, to prove something to herself. In flight from disappointment, she blindly catches a plane to Hong Kong that almost crashesĪged 16, she jumped off a harbour wall, a 15-metre drop – it was a dare – into black water, in a turning tide. She keeps life as well as death slightly – for this is subtle – at bay. It has the sheen of fiction.Īt times, she chooses the third person (especially when the subject matter includes ex-lovers), which deepens an existing sense that she is not quite owning her experience. Her memoir is fluent, poised, packed with colourful details. But O’Farrell is practised at taking charge. ![]() When life is the author, there is no telling what the narrative will include: it can be raggedly out of control. One of the most striking and unsettling things about it is that she writes almost as though she were a fictional character herself. O’Farrell has written seven accomplished novels, and this is her first work of nonfiction. The book is uncomfortable and compelling – a page-turner. O’Farrell is expert at proceeding obliviously, at ducking the scythe, and it is only towards the end of the book that she admits to having had, throughout her life, a cavalier attitude towards risk.
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