Book Review: Shy: A Memoir by Sian Prior

An attractive, forty-something woman peers around a gallery, trying vainly to find her partner in the buzzing party crowd. ‘A familiar sensation was sweeping through my body’, Sian Prior writes. ‘It was as if someone had spiked my drink so that instead of sparkling mineral water I was now sipping a kind of effervescent cement’. Unable to spot a familiar face, she starts to sweat and her stomach churns. Alight with panic she flees the party, not even recognising the ‘calm, confident blonde woman’ she glimpses in a mirror on the way out.

Prior, a successful arts journalist, choir master, public speaker and media consultant, suffers from crippling shyness. But this Renaissance woman is also a published author and writing teacher, and the incident jolts her into an exploration of the paradox of her life – that someone so comfortable in the public spotlight could also be felled by terror in unstructured social situations.

That paradox makes this book unique. Its author was born to tell her own story of shyness because her professional persona is the perfect vehicle for spreading the message.

Shy is no conventional memoir, but nor is it a self-help book. Prior ditches a chronological account of her life and replaces it with a panoply of elements – interviews with psychologists (including her own mother, Margot) and her own research; playful lists; play-offs between incidents from her past and theories of shyness – to present a frank account that is often funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.

Although the result can feel anarchic at times, it works beautifully; experience and vivid recollection step in where the research evidence is simplistic, suggesting both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific definitions.

To cope with the shyness she has battled all along, Prior developed a persona she calls ‘Professional Sian’ – a confident, polished performer who knows how to fake it till she makes it.

But ‘Shy Sian’ surfaces when there is no script, no structure. And for Prior this has meant a lifetime of lost social and romantic opportunities  – from Sally, the school friend round the corner who the young Sian is too scared to visit, to ‘the beautiful dark-eyed boy glimpsed in the stairwell of my first high school’. She has missed out not just on sex but ‘the subtle semaphore of attraction’.

For Prior, shyness is as much about fearful thoughts – what she calls the ‘what ifs’ – as it is about the intensely discomfiting physical symptoms: ‘armpits drenched, throat clenched, locked in battle with myself’. While travelling in Europe in her twenties, Prior develops a stubborn throat lump: ‘Lying on my hostel bunk in the night I would feel it resting there, nuzzling at my vocal cords’.

There is a central narrative here that anchors Prior’s account to the recent past. For ten years she lived with the musician Paul Kelly (whom Prior calls Tom in the book) – an Australia folk hero, one of our national bards. She reveals their slow-burning courtship, which blossomed into a shared life, and the cocooning effect of this relationship on her sense of self.

Her relationship with Tom and other life experiences are held up to the light to examine what shyness isn’t as much as what it is. Is it genetic? What is its relationship to social phobia? Is it the same as introversion, or can a shy person be an extrovert? How does Tom’s fame relate to Prior’s own contradictory stance towards being in the spotlight? Is shyness related to hypersensitivity? She explores the positive character traits that go with shyness, like empathy, conscientiousness and a willingness to listen.

Then the unthinkable happens and Tom announces he is leaving. Suddenly the very rejection that all shy people fear has come to pass.

Upheaval follows, but it is viewed in the light of a formative childhood event – deepening the examination of the origins of shyness in ways that take it far beyond the biological.

Prior’s writing is fresh, visual, funny. She has a sharp recall of the quotidian detail but also the insight and hard-won wisdom of someone who has battled to live a socially and emotionally fulfilling life in the midst of a sometimes crippling fear.

Yet there is something implicit in this book that Prior herself doesn’t pay much attention to. Given the rise of positive psychology, I looked for the protective factors that enabled Prior to seek out significant relationships and pursue professional success.

Without diminishing her pain, I was also interested in the class aspects of her success – her psychologist mother is an obvious factor, as is her immersion in the world of classical music and love affair with the clarinet. But what about schooling – was a private school, with its small class sizes and individualised attention, a strengthening influence?

Prior, intent on exploring a trait that has been hidden and denied in her public life, seems mostly oblivious to these broader questions, although two things stand out that will be useful to anyone who is shy. ‘Professional Sian’ first came into being because Prior was able to find, in a high-profile environmental job, a cause far larger than her own insecurities. She also singles out a passionate curiosity about other people and the world as an incentive to push past her fears.

In public appearances since writing the book, Prior has discussed how risky it felt to break the illusion of her professional competence by publishing Shy. While her discoveries did not lead to the cure she originally hoped for, they have enabled a new-found acceptance, and Prior claims she is no longer embarrassed to be shy.

While Prior’s level of professional success may seem out of reach to many of us shy people, I found this encouraging rather than dispiriting. I suspect most of us have our own version of Professional Sian, and although she may not be as reliable or fearless as Prior’s version, this writer offers a bold role model for risk taking and a path to self-acceptance that many readers will benefit from.

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Why I Called My Memoir Love Shy

Picture:  Tambako the Jaguar

My memoir, which I first self-published back in 2012, is called Love Shy. As a confirmed commitment phobe I only settled on this title after going through a string of others, starting with the first one, Splitting.

I settled on Love Shy because it suggests my main disorders while acknowledging that there was a familial and psychological aspect to my illness, a basic problem with the formation of self – it wasn’t a case of a fully formed ego being hit by a breakdown out of the blue, which is how mental illness is sometimes represented in memoir.

But the term 'love shy' is now mired in controversy and I feel the need to explain why I used it.

Love Shy is the name of a forum, now notorious, that is the voice of the Incel community – a group of primarily men who are, to put it primly, unable to ‘get any’. Incel stands for involuntary celibacy. These are men who try their luck with women, and get nowhere.

The forum received worldwide attention following the horror of the Elliot Rodgers mass murder in Isla Vista, California. Not that he was on that forum as far as I’m aware, but there is a strong anti-feminist movement associated with particular Reddit groups that some men on the Love Shy forum subscribe to. Before the shooting spree that he carried out on 23 May, Rodgers had aired his revenge manifesto in a chilling video. In the video he expressed disdain for the women who had rejected him sexually over the years, and his intention to punish both them and the sexually active men whom he despised.

The misogyny of Rodgers’s thinking would have fitted in perfectly with those of many on the Incel forum. (Which is not to say the Incel community are potential mass murderers – in the light of the murders the internet exploded with debate between those blaming the murders on mental illness and those pinpointing the structural misogyny that made Rodgers’s views mainstream thinking. It’s worth mentioning that Rodgers killed five men, including himself, and two women.)

I’d looked at the Love Shy forum before the Rodgers murders, of course, but not analysed it in any depth. The forum seems to equate love shyness with involuntary celibacy. But my own definition of love shyness is the opposite of involuntary celibacy. The difficulty in making a distinction between the two terms indicates the difference between the unconscious and the conscious minds.

My memoir details how I ran away from love and emotional involvement. It’s not that I didn’t have opportunities – of course I did. And if asked at the time I would have said that of course I wanted a relationship. But I had a phobia about love and sex, so everything I did ensured that I obtained neither. The unconscious forces within me were stronger than my conscious wishes.

Committed relationships are quite different from casual sex. In fact as a young person I was very phobic about the latter too. There was an inner saboteur (which my psyche saw as a protector) that kept me away from both love and most sex.

Those who grew up with the internet won’t understand how much harder it was then to negotiate sex in real time, without the mediation of electronic devices to let one’s wishes be known at one remove. Before the rise of the internet, when you had to have some social confidence to negotiate casual sex, involuntary celibacy was the consequence of love shyness but for me they were not the same thing.

For me, the internet made it easy to get around that saboteur because meet-ups could be neatly arranged. I can now cope with the anxiety around casual encounters, although I’ve pretty much lost interest in them for various reasons. But the internet didn’t change the fundamental problem. Nevertheless I became more open over the years, and have begun to believe that fate itself has played a role in my more recent lack of long-term relationships. I had rejected the major loves of my life over a period of years and before the advent of the internet as dating platform. Perhaps these earlier rejections of love have created such bad karma that, willing or not, real relationships do not come my way.

As I've said, I found the internet amenable to ‘hooking up’ – although unless you’re at any age where a large pool of your peers are unattached, actually finding suitable candidates for even casual encounters is not that easy. But what I realised from these experiences, as well as countless celibate ‘pre-dates’ with both men and women, is that whether you find a relationship or not is ultimately out of your control. Sure, you can increase your chances by frequent dating, joining interest or hobby groups and pursuing ‘personal growth’ (using your intuition to avoid time-wasting and dangerous situations) but, at the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, it’s really up to the universe.

My date-to-relationship ratio has been about 60:0 (this excludes casual short term relationships). Sex may seem available at the drop of a hat, but bad casual sex can actually reduce your chances of a future relationship because not only will you will need time to emotionally process the negative experiences, but they could damage your level of trust in the future. Which is not to say all casual sex is bad of course – intuition is the key here.

Some people are simply frightened of their own inexperience, or just very shy, and have been able to use the medium of the internet to start off with casual sex and then move onto relationships once they got the chance, without having any deep-seated fear of involvement. Good luck to them.

It may even be true what the male incels say about women – that most can get sex if they really want it and therefore can’t rightly be called incel.

But to my mind a phobic fear of love, intimacy and the often wordless courtship rituals that surround those things is not the same as the fear of casual sex, a fear that may be more controllable now that sex can be neatly arranged beforehand via dating sites, email and texting.

Despite what some incel men believe, it’s therefore quite possible that there are love shy women out there (using my definition)  who can get casual sex if they want to, but flee potential relationships – not that I think my level of phobia was or is very common.

I doubt very much whether most of the men on the Love Shy forum have the kind of problem that plagued me. They seem to be willing to approach women, and to ask for what they want. In their own narratives, they just keep getting rejected. Instead of thinking their own approach might be the problem they therefore conclude that women are castrating bitches.

But in a great irony, this is itself a form of self-sabotage. Patriarchy is a psychological construct and never just a social one, but male power is contested these days. Patriarchal masculinity and its manifestations, ranging from old-fashioned views on rape to the extremities of domestic violence, are often evidence of crippling psychic terrors to do with fear of abandonment and fear of female sexual power that are beyond my powers of analysis (and may also be related to early trauma).

Clearly it is not just the misogynistic views of these men but the psychic defences that underpin them that are the problem.

So perhaps these men are in fact closer to me than I would like to think, to the extent that both they and I employ psychic defence mechanisms (albeit very different ones).

Patriarchal machismo is a powerful psychic defence – but this is not immediately clear because in so many circumstances it is socially sanctioned.

The more embittered men on the Love Shy forum might do well to go into therapy with qualified psychologists who could help them to challenge their fears of genuine involvement with, and commitment to, people of the opposite gender – as well as the distorted ideas about women they have picked up.

As for me I can rail against fate all I like but the fact is that what we have done in the past always affects the present. My rejections of love have helped make me the person I am today. Being in Grow has enabled me to adopt a more philosophical approach to life, and to accept that if I follow my path I’ll be okay. But my past actions with significant others continue to haunt me.

Love Shy: a Memoir of Social and Sexual Terror is available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon. It's available on  the UK Amazon site here and on the Australian or US Amazon site here.

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Farewell to Jordan

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

Jordan, my beloved friend, is dead. The lines from Wordsworth are perhaps a little hyperbolic, but seem to fit. The insult of death, especially when it’s sudden, has a melodramatic aspect to it.

Jordan (a pseudonym) was the ginger-coloured spaniel of my elder sister and her family. Only seven years old, he had a tumour on the liver. It wasn’t diagnosed until a few days before his death – he'd stopped eating and had no energy. My brother-in-law rang me on the Tuesday night at about six pm and told me that Jordan was going to be put to sleep the following day. Would I like to come over and say goodbye?

When I got there an open fire was burning in the lounge room and a lamp cast a soft light. Jordan lay on a rug in front of the fire, surrounded by his immediate family along with another of my sisters and her two daughters. At the sight of me he lifted his head and his bushy tail wagged for a second or two. I sobbed into his fur. But he was not the playful puppy I loved. He was a very sick dog who was focused on the business of dying, and who had to be stroked carefully for fear of hurting him.

For the first few years of his life I walked him twice a week, usually in mid-morning, at the nearby Ainslie Park. This was the source of the intimacy we shared, when we revelled in the wind and the trees and the feeling of freedom. I wrote a few blog entries on our fun times and travails, and the ongoing conflict with my sister and her husband over their treatment of Jordan.

I taught him to heel and to stay, and unsuccessfully tried to teach him to return the ball. Whether he would do the latter was conditional on whether you had a treat ready to give him – he’d have ‘a bob both ways’, throwing the ball down with his mouth and then quickly nosing at my hand for the treat, then picking the ball up again if the hand was empty. ‘Jordan, the point to giving the ball back is that I can throw it again!’ But all my efforts were in vain. Still, he heeled and stayed like a true champ.

On one of our typical walks, we stagger along the picturesque walkway with its crunchy white gravel, cross narrow Ainslie Road and we’re at the park entrance, Jordan pulling at the leash and frantically sniffing any dogs arriving and departing (his heeling skills would manifest in inverse proportion to our closeness to the park). Passing under the winding avenue of large elm trees, I tell him we are nearing the oval, knowing that dogs understand some English (the average number of words is apparently 165).

When we get there I lean down and unclip the leash from his collar, feeling the little torso quiver in anticipation. ‘Free!’ I yell like a demented army sergeant, wanting to make the distinction clear between the discipline of the paths and the liberty of the oval. He dashes off for a while as if I’m his sworn enemy and then slows down and seems to lose focus. He is caught by the rich cocktail of smells locked in the grass. From now on he will alternate between a complete absorption in these messages and a focus on me and the other dogs.

He is always a little lost, a little confused, a bit ADD. I don’t think he’s dumb though – I think it’s a case of overstimulation. There are too many messages pinging across to those extraordinary olfactory nerves. One of his favourite things to do in the park is to roll on the grass, bathing himself in the scents of manure and whatever else he can smell (apparently wolves do this in order to bring information back to the pack). He always has a far-off, blissed-out expression when he does this.

Under my uneven supervision, Jordan cheated death a couple of times, disappearing in the direction of busy Wattle Road on one occasion, and dashing across the quiet street at the back of the park on the other, when there luckily happened to be no cars on it. (The risk I took in regularly walking someone else’s dog – I shudder at it. There were other incidents too – dogs, people and sometimes kids and babies make for scary combinations and I was out of my depth sometimes.)

The saddest thing – which I don’t want to write about but must – is that I had abandoned Jordan before his death; put the relationships with my sister and her husband in the too-hard basket, and therefore my friendship with him. It was part of my growing ‘maturity’, to accept that I wasn’t close to the family and therefore couldn’t hope to be close to their dog. (Meanwhile my interactions with the neglected puppies in the semi-detached next door were childishly passive-aggressive towards their owner.)

But it was true, I didn’t feel welcome at his house. And his life was sad; he told me as much the last time I took him to the park. I think it was January, I don’t remember exactly, when I decided on a whim to ring up and ask to take him on a walk and the answer was yes, of course. He wasn’t getting enough exercise at this point and by the age of about six had become portly, as well as stiff from a disc injury. We had a lovely roam that day, but at one point he grew sad and we sat on the grass and he looked pensive, slowly blinking those impossibly long eyelashes.

That walk was the last time I saw him well, as the Jordan I knew and loved. I found his life hard to witness; easier to stay away and whinge about the way our society treats dogs and congratulate myself on not having one myself.

How much did my early support make his loneliness harder to bear? Did he wonder when I was coming next? How much did he suffer and how much of that suffering was related to me? There are no answers to these questions.

Yet it’s not guilt I feel exactly, just regret. What this has taught me is that you cannot simply sever a connection of longstanding with someone just because they aren’t human. The connection remains. I have no doubt that Jordan remembered me and regretted my absence from his life.

My initial grief was quite bitter and full of despair for the loneliness of his life. But now, less than a week later, I’m able to take a more balanced view. His life wasn’t all sadness. There were family holidays to the New South Wales coast, walks with my sister, and pats in the evenings in front of TV. He had wormed his way inside the house from being an outside dog, and for the last six months of his life slept in my sister and her husband’s bedroom. Also, various renovations of my sister’s house have been going on for years, and the builders often brought their dogs along with them (tradies often seem to have strong bonds with their dogs). And even though he was alone too much, he lived in the moment, and could rise to puppy excitement as soon as the prospect of interaction presented itself.

One impediment to the grieving process is that no memorial service is planned. In the absence of that, my perfect funeral for him is played in my head, a mixture of inspiring songs and stories about his escapades.

I sit at my computer and play those songs on YouTube. The following have provided much comfort: ‘Short note’ by Matt Finish, ‘I sing the body electric’ from the film Fame, and ‘The valley’, soulfully sung by the inimitable KD. Leo Sayer in his early emo period has been helpful. The soppiest Barbara Streisand standards have been inevitable.

The absence of a funeral also sent me on a return visit to the park last weekend, to see what it was like without him and to understand. I sat alone on a bench at the edge of the oval in my sunglasses, melodramatic as a movie star. The dead leaves from the elm tree above me tinkled down a few at a time. The sky couldn’t decide what it was doing – there were long brushes of cirrus as well as bits of cumulus cloud. The light felt wrong – overcast and glare-y at the same time. The few dog owners and their dogs seemed a long way away; the dogs looked like yearlings, just overgrown puppies. I didn’t know any of them. None of the people I had got to know at the park were there. The sense of time having passed was excruciating. I realised that the park and Jordan and I had long finished – and I was mourning that period of my life for the first time.

It’s the very physicality of dogs that makes it harrowing to mourn them. Our relationships with them have less cerebral content than those we share with humans, and are based on the shared experience of the moment. I find it hard to picture Jordan’s face, and although I hadn’t seen him for ages until the night before he died, part of the reason for the lack of a mental image is the sense that his essence was expressed in motion rather than speech. Jordan's essence - that of a sometimes daffy 'people person' with a stubborn streak, who knew his own mind, was loyal to a fault and endlessly optimistic - is still with me and I hope always will be.

Farewell, my darling. Thanks for the happy times. Your aunty misses you so much, but she knows that you're no longer suffering and is endlessly grateful for your loving friendship.

PS: The photo above isn't of Jordan, but is an uncanny likeness of him as a puppy from the Dogs Trust website.

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Slightly Nutty Uploads New Book Cover

Exciting news - I've given my blog compilation a new cover!

These blog entries have all been lovingly edited and cleaned up and handpicked for your delectation.

Okay, well perhaps more exciting things have happened in the world. But I did the cover all by myself, and with a photo sourced from the creative commons, no less.

Oh I hate selling. I am not good at it. It goes against the very fibre of my being, unless I am selling for someone else.

You can buy it here. Or here if you're in the UK. Find out more about it here. Okay I'm out of here.

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Long Live Pippi Longstocking: Appreciating the Larger-Than-Life Friend

Friendships, like life partnerships, are not always simply about similar goals, values and shared interests. Sometimes they’re about complementarities. There’s a category of friend many of us make in our formative years, and sometimes maintain into adulthood – the larger-than-life, or LATL, friend.

The larger-than-life friend is usually fearless – not always completely, but in areas where we may quail. The larger-than-life friend is louder, sometimes physically broader or taller, and more daring than us. When it comes to her background she is a creature of extremes: her home life is likely to have been either more loving and nurturing than ours, or dramatically more dysfunctional; her parents are either poorer or wealthier than ours. The LATL friend may be simply warm, outgoing and exuberant, but she may also have a brilliant comic streak, a sense of the absurd that we aspire to, and a willingness to challenge authority. She is often a youngest child.

The key to a successful LATL friendship is not to try to emulate her, or put oneself down for being lesser in any way. The LATL friend will be drawn to us for what we are not as much as what we are. She may appreciate our average families, our more settled and boring lives. She may gain a degree of emotional stability from our company. She may draw from us strains of humour and brightness that we did not realise we possessed, and appreciate them more than we realise. We do not have to try to be like her, but simply continue to be ourselves.

LATL friends are not always real. I have no idea whether the average imaginary friend of childhood is a LATL friend, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sometimes imaginary friends are created by skilled storybook authors. For me Pippi Longstocking, created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren in the late 1930s – early 1940s, was the quintessential LATL friend who set the standard for the flesh-and-blood ones that came after her.

The beauty of Pippi is that she is entirely free of authority figures. In contrast to her next door neighbours, Tommy and Annika Settergren, whom she befriends and shares adventures with, she does what she pleases. She doesn’t go to school, cares nothing for social graces and is always breaking taboos.

Pippi (full name Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking) is a virtual orphan, living happily alone in a home she calls Villa Villekulla in a small Swedish village. Her sea captain father disappeared in a storm but according to Pippi is living as a cannibal king on a South Sea island. She has two pets, a monkey called Mr Nilsson and a horse called Little Old Man. She is said to have the physical strength of ‘ten policemen’ and often picks up Little Old Man and carries him from one place to another. Happy and exuberant, she is a shameless liar and truth-stretcher and is always manipulating adults into doing her bidding.

Pippi’s bizarre appearance declares her eccentricity: her tight orange plaits stick out from the sides of her head, her stockings don’t match and she towers above Tommy and Annika. Although she protects the weak and encourages rebellion she is never violent. She owns a suitcase of gold pieces so is financially independent. I’m sure reading about Pippi’s many adventures (there were three books in all) helped me handle my early LATL friendships.

Real-life LATLs, while lacking the freedom and physical prowess of Pippi, often have so much life-force that they bestow a degree of friendship on the siblings of their primary friend. I was friendly with more than one of my elder sister’s LATL friends, but it is Philippa who stands out the most. Philippa and my sister went to school together then shared an Edwardian house in groovy, inner-city Prahran in the early 1980s, playing host to a regular stream of artistic friends and boyfriends.

I idolised Philippa. Of solid build, with huge blue eyes and golden blonde hair, she had a country exuberance and friendliness that were increasingly tempered by arty sophistication, a vibrant, anarchic laugh that could be heard above the loudest party music, and a private-school accent that was inexplicable yet charming. She had a romantic history that would have filled volumes and a nurturing, motherly side that I flew towards. Philippa’s drawcard was not that she was the funniest or even the most intelligent young woman. It was her ability to extract the maximum from those around her, delighting in the humour of others and the quirks of human existence. She was studying psychology and as her social and love lives became busier she tilted dangerously between chaos and order, seeming to know instinctively where to stop the seesaw so that chaos never managed to gain the ascendant.

Once, home alone at my parents’ place, I thought I heard a burglar and got spooked. Philippa answered the phone when I rang Eleanor in a panic. She immediately ordered me over to Prahran despite the fact that Eleanor was out. Dressed in her white bathrobe she made camomile tea for us both. ‘Things can feel really scary when you’re on your own,’ she offered as she tucked her feet under her, sat down on the other end of the couch and gazed at me in sympathy. Her large eyes shone as she clutched the steaming cup and I read in them two motivations, and was perfectly happy with both: the desire to be supportive and a hunger for drama, for a heightening of life’s ordinariness.

At the time I had my own LATL friend, who could not have been more different than Philippa. Geraldine was physically taller and broader than me but it wasn’t just her size that enabled her to dominate the space around her. She was thirsty for attention, would court it and suck it up from wherever it came. She was the youngest child in a dysfunctional Irish Catholic family dogged by the twin curses of mental illness and alcoholism. Like her siblings she was brilliantly comic; for many years I kept a tape we made on one nothing-to-do summer afternoon at my place when we were about fifteen.

In the background, a telephone starts to ring. ‘The phone rings’, Geraldine pronounces in an ominous male narrator tone as she lolls on the bed. ‘Who will answer it?’ She then begins riffing on a hysterical middle-aged reaction to a dodgy television program playing in front of an imaginary child: ‘Turn—the—television off! Turn it off!’

Geraldine is long gone, taken by the evil, self-hating sprite who dwelt within her and waited to claim her at a weak moment. Like me she grew up with undiagnosed mental illness but unlike me she forged a path to adulthood for herself, having a baby in an early relationship and then meeting the love of her life with whom she was living when she died, it’ll be fourteen years ago this year.

There’s just one other LATL friend I want to pay tribute to in this blog entry; she died young too, of breast cancer. In the last year of secondary school, most weeknights I walked home from the tram terminus with my younger sister Simone and our mutual friend Kathy; boy that girl was wild. Or so it seemed at the time: in hindsight, not all the wild girls were acting out; some of them just grew up more quickly.

Kathy was fearless and from an early age she drank and smoked dope and partied and had lots of illicit boyfriends. It would have been futile to even try to emulate her but she was a few years below me at the Catholic convent we all attended, so I never felt that I had to. Neither Simone nor I would have mucked around with her at school if we had been in the same year, yet the three of us got on like a house on fire on those walks home.

I picture her walking between Simone and me, skipping slightly ahead as she relates something outrageous she’s done or cackles about some dippy teacher. I see now that her main function was to keep Simone and me from tearing into each other; she held each of us at bay, neutralising our mutual animosity, our unceasing grappling for space and attention. She never would have played this role consciously but her optimism, warmth and fearlessness did the job.

She couldn’t have cared less how she looked; she had uncombed straggly black-brown hair, a sweet creamy lightly freckled face, wild, gesturing hands, very light-coloured eyes and a body that was always curving into a dance of exuberance at whatever brazen act she had done or was about to do. Like many young women who grow up quickly she ended up marrying young, having kids, and working in unskilled jobs; and then the breast cancer claimed her. But she crammed lots of life and laughter into those years.

The LATL friend can lead our adolescent selves into frightening new territory if we let her; if not she may leave us behind. Sometimes, if the LATL friend is too reckless or self-destructive, this is inevitable. It didn’t happen with Kathy, because she was secure enough to accept Simone and me as we were: a tiny bit prissy but witty enough to keep up, and always willing to offer our admiration and sympathy.

If you have LATL friends in adulthood, treasure them but never feel that you are inferior for being less attention-getting or having more mundane problems. You and your friend may be mirroring in each other the qualities that are undeveloped in yourselves. As long as you appreciate and enjoy these complementarities, your friendship will continue to flourish and nurture you both. We can’t all be Pippi Longstocking, but that’s all the more reason to relish her company.

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Dog Despair

Neurotic and self-obsessed as I am, minor physical problems can throw me into a tizz. I metaphorically shake my fist at the sky and am haunted by dark imaginings of future health nightmares: rosacea will scar my face horribly; tinnitus will sound like a crazed pizza deliverer who keeps knocking at the front door, never realising he's come to the wrong place; I'll get permanent brain damage from the black mould on the kitchen ceiling. And then I pick myself up and gradually learn to manage and adjust to the latest issue that life and ageing have imposed.

When other people in my life show signs of ill-health it’s even more dire. These people are not supposed to get sick. They are there to support me, aren’t they? (Well actually no, but that’s what I believe deep down.) When family members acquire conditions much more serious than whatever I’ve had to put up with physically speaking, it feels as if the universe is making a direct attack on my fragile support systems. Forget the people themselves.

The people may not necessarily be human.

So far I’ve taken three paragraphs to get around to the point of this blog entry: Jordan, the 99-per-cent-cocker-spaniel-one-per-cent-cute dog that belongs to the family of one my sisters and that I used to walk in the park twice a week, has a slipped disc.

As soon as I write this, it starts to sound trivial. Anything to do with dogs ultimately does. Their status is infinitely limited compared with humans. The ones who are truly cosseted are derided by society with the label ‘pooch’.

As with all non-human animals, part of the reason we trivialise their suffering is because they can’t tell us how they’re feeling. So we take the easy way out and assume they put up with suffering more easily than we do. We tell ourselves that animals are hardy creatures who live and die in the wild without doctors, artificial heating, or guarantees of a regular food source, and that with us as their carers they have it made. I wish that as a society we could start to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Jordan has his own chair in the lounge room because the family don’t like him sitting on their large modular couch. His old chair – a black swivel leather chair – was fine. But they didn’t like the look of it so they got him a new one and that’s when the trouble started. The new chair was too high for him and he slipped a disc when trying to jump up onto it.

I went around to my sister’s place last Friday to say hello to Jordan and sit with him for a while. I kind of invited myself, something I normally don't do, but I was anxious to see that he was okay and give him some time. My sister agreed to me dropping over at 4.30 that day, and I promised her she wouldn't have to stop and entertain me. The self-invitation turned out to be a perfectly predictable mistake. 

I found him worse than I’d wanted to believe. He greeted me at the front door so excited he was shivering compulsively, but when placed back in his previous position he lay there listlessly. He can walk around slowly but should be resting. Watching his attempt to simply sit on his haunches was pitiful: tentatively moving his bum towards the floor, then giving up; obviously too painful. He is, to put it bluntly, temporarily disabled. Someone who didn’t know what was wrong might assume he was an elderly dog with a terrible case of arthritis.

My sister has taken him to the vet and he is now on painkillers and will go back for a further check-up next week, with x-rays a possibility if he makes no progress. He is obviously in some pain even when still, but it is not so extreme that he is yelping, as he was before the painkillers. ‘It could be months ...’ I said to my sister, who is a nurse and understands the travails of recovery. She nodded. ‘I know,’ she said in her irritable way. When she lets herself stop and focus on Jordan, she has a reservoir of affection for him, calling him puppy even though he's now five years old, and insisting that he uses his long ginger-coloured eyelashes to communicate: 'Look, see how he blinks to tell you how he's feeling!'

But the spigot of her empathy is easily turned off. Since the onset of the condition Jordan is allowed to sit on the couch with a towel underneath, but apparently only during the day when my sister is not at work. ‘We need the couch to ourselves,’ she explained as she relegated him to a corner next to the television at around 5.30 pm. In this alternative position he lies on a doubled-over rug where he can’t see the television screen; not that he seems much interested in it, but it means he’s cut off from what the rest of the family is doing when they’re all sitting down together to watch it. Jordan’s haunted, unhappy eyes shone darkly from this lowly (and probably colder) position; I imagine this alternative spot is because my sister’s husband doesn’t like him being on the couch, and was due home any minute.

There's no one to blame for this mishap, and it wasn't foreseeable. But I can't help seeing a kind of metaphoric correlation between the family's lack of care and Jordan's current state. They seem obscurely to blame for not watching over him more closely. And assuming Jordan’s new chair was higher than the couch, the family’s subtle distancing of him (not allowing him on the couch in the first place) has inadvertently contributed. My sister is cosseting him somewhat, but not enough.

My tenuous relationship with him has become even more fragile, because I can only see him within the confines of the house, where I am soon made to feel unwelcome – ‘of course you can stay, sorry, could you get off the couch? I have to tidy up, I’m always like this on a Friday afternoon’ – and I am shooed out along with the dirt my sister is sweeping up from the living room floor in preparation for her husband’s return from work.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Dog Days.

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Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

Photo by Harmony and Home

Can writing a memoir actually help heal a painful past? Is it therapeutic, or does it simply provoke bitter memories and angry ghosts that are better left alone? Like an explorer returning exhausted but triumphant from a gruelling journey, full of information about the terrain she’s traversed, I can assure you that the psychic knowledge that results from memoir writing is well worth the effort.

But there is a catch. If you want your writing to come alive, you'll need to revisit the raw trauma of the original pain, and risk being seared and burned by it once more.

To write a memoir that I considered worthwhile, I had to relive painful experiences and periods. I was aiming for a sensual, immediate tone that strongly evoked each episode (I’m not saying I achieved that – just that I tried). So I plunged myself back into each stinging memory, and consciously tried to recall exactly how it felt to be in that situation at the time.

Not an exercise for the fainthearted.

That goes for particular episodes. But what happens when you’re writing about a significant period of your life for a matter of weeks and even months? When I was 20 I moved into a share house in the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy that was opposite an estate of high-rise public housing flats. This was way before Fitzroy’s gentrification and the culture shock was immense, not only in regard to the geography but to the lifestyles of my lefty housemates. I soon developed a crush on one of them, and the intensity of those feelings is inseparable from the bohemian romanticism of the shabby iron-laced terrace we inhabited.

While I was writing the scenes set in my Fitzroy abode, I felt haunted. I was living in two eras at once, the present and the early 1980s, and two places at once, the terrace house and my current flat. The contrast between my past and present lifestyle, combined with strong feelings of connectedness with people I hadn’t seen for more than 25 years, was profoundly disorientating. I was surrounded by ghosts who would not let me go. Perhaps – and here’s the kicker – I was releasing feelings for them that I hadn’t felt secure enough to fully experience (let alone express)  at the time.

When you’re going through something like that it can feel as if it will never end. You wonder if you’ll be permanently trapped in an emotional time warp. But it does pass. Not that the feelings don’t come up again every now and again – I believe now that if a traumatic experience is sufficiently intense it creates its own momentum in the psyche, and complete freedom from it may never be possible. But for me at least the intensity is now far less, and I’m a freer human being through having released those pent-up emotions.

Not only that, but in a strange way you may gain a stronger relationship with yourself. I know myself better now. I’m Adrienne McGill who experienced certain very human emotions at a particular time, not simply Adrienne McGill who went into meltdown when she moved out of home for the first time. I’ve become better acquainted with the non-pathological aspects of my younger self; it’s like meeting a scary stranger who is much less frightening once you get to know them.

Memoir writing and forgiveness

Sometimes writing the memoir involved not just reliving old emotions, but experiencing difficult new ones. A memoir forces you to examine your personal journey with a keen and bloodless eye. While you're working out what really happened, no one can be allowed to get off the hook.

So, not the most forgiving daughter at the best of times, I was faced with powerful anger as I put together the jigsaw puzzle picture of my life. The mistakes my parents made were routine rather than extreme, but they sometimes had profound effects. For much of the time of writing I was furious with both of them in a way I hadn’t been before, but particularly so with my mother.

But understanding something cognitively ultimately allows you to move beyond it. Discovering something new about the reasons for a pathology makes you realise that your brain is much more adaptable and creative than you'd given it credit for. You begin to perceive the perverse rationality of your dysfunction, to view it as a logical reaction to circumstances. Aha you say, this is why I closed up, or this is why I acted out. You gain more compassion for yourself.

You may also end up with compassion for the authority figures that once oppressed you. It took me a long time to escape from the deep well of anger for my mother that I was thrown into. I was angry with her even before I started writing the memoir and, in the way described above, my anger intensified while writing it. I’ll never completely lose the anger, but it has now substantially subsided.

This is partly because however egregious my mum’s perceived failures, writing about her has forced me to see her as a separate human being with a life independent of me, and her own story of parental failure. (Making me less narcissistic in the process.)

But it’s also because I now own my own story. I’ve set it out, and my mother’s an important part of it, and I’ve told what I believe to be the truth about our relationship. I’m somehow freed by the fact that the story of me and her is now on the public record. And this is not dependent on some kind of public naming and shaming – it’s all been done very discreetly.

This greater ability to distinguish my identity from hers makes it possible for me to go forward with the understanding and knowledge that I don’t have to live my life as an endless response to our story and relationship. Instead, I can live my life with courage, stretching myself and fulfilling the potential of the creativity that was buried so long under neurosis.

Publishing a book can give you a stronger sense of self regardless of whether it's about your own life. Completing my first book, which was about shopping, and having it out in the public realm helped me start to separate from my family. The memoir has boosted this process simply by being another book, but its subject matter has also helped to free me from the psychoanalytic aspects of my background. I’m now an author with my name on the cover of three books (even if it’s a pseudonym for two of them). I can begin to stop hoping that my family will one day be what I want them to be, and instead get on with being the person that I am.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like You Must Remember This.

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The Emotional Trajectory of the Common Cold

I’ve recently recovered from a slight cold and am fascinated by the emotional trajectory I’ve been on.

The cold hit me on Monday night, with a sudden fit of hayfever-like sneezing when I turned the dusty gas heater on in the loungeroom. I started to feel that hazy exhaustion that creeps up on you slowly until your brain finally registers the fact of malady. I didn’t want a cold because I can never sleep while my nose is running, but that first flooding of the taps was it. After that it was just the kind of cotton woolly, remote feeling that only makes sense when you’re lying in bed propped up by pillows reading a deliciously spooky book with Classic FM playing the top classical 100.

In other words, the first day of the cold was utter bliss. It happened to be a public holiday, adding to the sense of unearthly lull. I had a deadline the next day and did the few hours of work required to keep up. Then I escaped to the haven of Bed, and read for a while, and when my brain was too tired to read, slept, and then read again. Lovely.

The next day I had to do more work. I met the deadline at around 3, and then it was back to bed, again feeling suitably deserving. Naughtily I hadn’t had a shower since Monday – not like me at all, but it was scary how easily not having a shower became normal!

By Thursday I was starting to feel stir-crazy and desperate to get out of the house. I got up early and, determined to stay up, showered, dressed and escaped to the local shopping mall, ostensibly searching for early Christmas presents but really just playing hooky. Unfortunately I was squandering my limited stores of energy and that afternoon after lunch I collapsed in front of the heater, alternating between a futile struggle to keep reading and an exhausted doze. I was starting to be plagued by the usual spectre of Things Not Done, and to get angry about my lack of energy.

A visit to my mother that morning hadn’t helped. I’d dropped over to borrow a handsaw on the way back from the shopping mall. October has been the wettest spring in Victoria for 18 years (thankfully the dams are now more than half-full) and my front yard was a wilderness of feral foliage threatening to engulf me like the forest in Sleeping Beauty. I would take control! I would rise like the Phoenix with renewed strength and hack through the gnarled branches of my wintry hibernation, greeting the emerging summer sun and embracing a fuller life.

Detailing my relationship with my mother would take a book rather than a blog entry, but she has always reflected my own mental and physical health issues (many of which, sadly, she unwittingly passed on to me). I’ve recently realised that, apart from chronic low blood sugar, she has probably been suffering from low-level depression, or dysthymia, for my entire life. (Quite possibly her mother also suffered it.) On this day she was on the couch reading the paper, and now that she has osteoporosis (it is being treated but it’s a long haul) she’s increasingly surrounded by the semi-controlled mess of my hoarder father.

She looked up at me with that undisguised, slightly bitter exhaustion she hides so well from her friends and extended family, but is ‘where she lives’, so to speak. Everything seemed to crystallise in my all too damning assessment: she wanted to move from the house years ago, and downsize as her friends were doing; my father wouldn’t move because of his hoarding, and the strong emotional attachment he retains to his birth family, from whom he’d bought the house when my sisters and I were still young.

My mother got her first fracture a few years ago, running around the too-big house and enormous garden as she desperately cleaned up before a birthday celebration – her birthday. It seemed to me on the day I visited that she was trapped in that house, and was now further entrapped by her condition. And I too was similarly trapped in my large rundown flat, which allowed me to spread myself out but was bringing me down with its overactive garden, and the burden of fatigue caused by rising damp, dust and mould.

In a sense, I was both my mother and my father – staying in the house because the part of me that loved to spread out was now free, but burdened by its size and age. And the rent was going up by $50 a week in January.

It all seemed so hopeless, no doubt through the prism of my lingering cold, and I left with an exaggerated determination to hold victory over my own lack of energy, expressed in the chaos of my front garden. So naturally the afternoon hiatus in front of the heater was upsetting, forced as it might have been.

Things got a bit better on Friday – I did an hour and a half of ruthless sawing, sadly paying little heed to the laws of pruning, choosing branches for disposal I could reach on a footstool. I left the mess where it fell, and the next morning sawed and piled the branches neatly.

I’m only now just getting back to normal. Chaos is at bay in both the back and front yards, although the front already needs one more good bout of the clipper and the handsaw, and one of the branches of the plum tree out the back seems to have shot out by two feet in about ten days – I kid you not. But it pains me that all I have the energy to do is keep things at some level of order rather than imposing my own order, and developing or reshaping the garden. On the other hand, I live on a main road, and the untamed bushes give me valuable privacy, not to mention the shade they offer to the armies of joggers, nannies, young families, dedicated dog walkers and iPod-strewn power walkers that pass by every hour of the day.

All is not lost. I spoke to my psyche recently about the feeling of not being able to separate from my mother, or forgive her for her lack of nurturing. ‘It’s your turn now,’ she said. In the context of the discussion, she meant it was my turn to be in life’s spotlight, to be an adult and enjoy myself. But I also read this remark another way – that it was my turn to take over the role of mothering myself.

Sometime in the future I may also have to look after my mother a bit. I say ‘a bit’ because, given the fragility of our relationship and my low energy levels, an intense level of the caring role on my part would be impossible, and because two of my sisters also live in the area and, if necessary, will be able to share the burden. But now at least I can countenance offering some level of care in the next five or ten years, even if it’s just a regular tidy up of the house or a weekly trip to the shops. Now I can stop expecting that one day in the very near future my mother will finally decide to do ‘her job’ and look after me. She won’t – it’s my turn now.

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Progress report: diet, dogs and trying to meditate

I’ve been meaning to write something about the changes I’ve noticed since going on an incredibly strict food intolerance diet, and thought I'd combine a progress report with a couple of other ‘developments’.

I’m on a strict version of the Failsafe diet, which rules out all food additives as well as two groups of chemicals that occur naturally in foods: salicylates and amines. My diet is also gluten-free, dairy-free, yeast-free, fruit-free, and sugar-free (the first four of these additional restrictions are necessary for some Failsafers, but not all).

I’d been on a diet that had these four restrictions as their basis for many years (though with plenty of ‘lapses’) but never tried to avoid salicylates and amines (in no way am I suggesting that others should follow this diet, especially the extreme version I’m on!).

Researchers have found that not only does the Failsafe diet improve the symptoms of ADHD but it also improves behaviour and mood including depression. Food intolerance has also been linked with a number of other mental disorders.

So, even though an outbreak of hives drove me to this extreme rather than my mental ups and downs, I was curious as to what effect the diet would have on my overall mental and cognitive state now that I’ve been on it a couple of months.

So what changes have I noticed? My memory is definitely better. I’m retaining more of what I read. My thinking is sharper. My mood is also better, except on overcast days. I still get sad a lot, but it passes. I generally feel more positive.

I’m less angry. I noticed this when catching up with a friend recently. She’s a lovely person but a bit chaotic, and sometimes I’d get annoyed when she complained about her life. Last time I met up with her I was amazed at how calm I felt.

My concentration isn’t all that much better, though, mainly because my mind is less tired and quite ‘busy’. In fact, if anything I feel more concerned about particular activities that feel vitally important (for example, writing comments on political opinion sites!).

This feeling is quite compulsive – it’s been there for years in anything related to work or effort; but I think I’m just noticing it more because my thinking’s clearer, and it’s strengthened the sense that I may have a form of OCD, albeit not focused on things like germs and counting. The obsessiveness is also centred on what’s wrong with my body and mind – yet I’ve been less focused on my bodily imperfections lately, though winter could be the cause of this rather than the Failsafe diet.

I still have social phobia. However, there has been a small decrease in my physical anxiety.

The Failsafe diet dismisses sugar as a contributor to children’s behavioural and mood problems. Instead, it links hypoglycemic symptoms with salicylate intolerance. Failsafe also dismisses the scientifically controversial phenomenon of leaky gut, which some believe can cause and worsen food intolerances and an overgrowth of Candida, a type of yeast.

I still have low blood sugar, although I have to admit it seems to be less severe. I don’t know whether or not I have leaky gut but I still feel more tired, vaguer and quite depressed on overcast days, and I still get PMT during which my hypoglycemia is significantly worse. And, sad to say, I still have rosacea – being on an amazingly restricted diet hasn’t stopped me having red, rashy cheeks.

All the changes I’ve experienced are subtle – I don’t feel transformed, just a bit stronger, and I wouldn’t have the confidence to make a major change like applying for an in-house job.

My family and other animals

Sorry about the hackneyed heading, but it was just too relevant not to use! I have ongoing ‘difficulties’ with my family of origin, and these have deepened in recent years because two of my sisters acquired dogs and I wasn’t happy with the treatment of these unfortunate canines. I’m still not, but I wanted to report some progress on that front (I’ve changed everyone’s names).

There are two dogs in this saga. Jordan is a lively, mischievous, ginger-coloured, mostly-cocker-spaniel owned by my older sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. There’s been ongoing disagreement between me and Andrea and Richard over the treatment of Jordan, who I used to walk regularly.

Sarah is a quiet, chocolate-brown, rather resigned retriever–wolfhound(?) cross who nevertheless transforms into superdog when someone throws a ball in her direction. She’s owned by one of my younger sisters, Therese, and her husband, Tony.

A particular incident around Easter sparked the latest dog fight. Sarah was left alone in Therese’s backyard for the four-day break, with my father visiting and feeding (and playing with her briefly) twice a day. On one of those days she came to my parents’ backyard for most of the day (they live down the road from Therese) and I walked her, and along with my parents gave her some attention.

Sarah is a challenging dog. Loving and calm around children, she hates most other dogs, and anyone who walks her must carry a bottle of water to spray into her face if she becomes aggressive towards a passing dog.

I had never seen this side of her and, thinking it couldn’t really be that bad, didn’t bother with the water on the Easter walk I took her on. But then we passed two dogs and a cat, luckily safely behind the neighbour’s front fence. Sarah suddenly lunged towards them, barking furiously while I pulled desperately at the leash to maintain control – she’s very strong and whimpered angrily when I finally managed to restrain her.

Clearly Sarah suffers from a lack of socialisation – this had soon become apparent after my sister found her through a rehousing service (she was already at least five years old). She had also become quite overweight since I’d seen her last, and was constantly panting even when lying down. All this, combined with my sister leaving her in the backyard over Easter, gave me a sense of despair about her situation that left me wanting to distance myself from Therese.

Since the arrangements to stop walking Jordan ended just after Christmas my relationship with Andrea and Richard hadn’t really improved much (this is beginning to sound like Days of our Lives crossed with Animal Rescue).

Anyway, last weekend I finally caught up with the family, after not seeing some of them for almost two months, at Therese’s place for a Mothers Day gathering. And there were some tiny but significant miracles.

The first one was that after delivering the family to Therese’s place, Richard went back to his place and brought Jordan back with him. Smelling Sarah even before he got to the front door, Jordan skidded frantically through the house to the backyard. He spent the afternoon there with Sarah and occasionally some of the children, trying to steal Sarah’s ball (by some quirk of fate, Sarah actually doesn’t mind Jordan, although she got a bit aggro at one point when he grabbed the ball).

The second miracle was that Sarah herself was looking much better than when I’d seen her last – leaner and healthier. This was because my oldest niece, who’s 16, had been taking her along with her on her runs, and Sarah apparently is too distracted when she’s running to bother about other dogs.

Jordan hadn’t forgotten me. As soon as I went outside he dashed towards me and, as I stroked his head and scratched his chin, stayed by me with a look of relief on his face. Our reunion, after almost five months, was much less gruelling than I’d rather melodramatically anticipated, but I still felt a level of guilt at having abandoned him.

It was good to see him as his same old self, and he was happy and active. Also, I knew that since I’d stopped walking him, Andrea had been taking more responsibility for him. I know he doesn’t get walked enough, and she doesn’t like the whole social scene at the park and so avoids taking him there, as she’s told me. But he seems better integrated into the family. He also spends a fair bit of time inside, I’m told.

Sure, I wasn’t happy as it began to get dark and the two canine pals forlornly stood sentry at the back door, soulful eyes watching the fun inside, cold and lonely and wanting to be part of their human packs, with me going outside to pat and soothe every now and then. But I’m happy about the progress that’s been made, and I just hope it can continue.

Good morning, meditation

I also wanted to report on my recent experience of trying to meditate. When I look back over my adult life, it could be viewed as one long failed attempt to meditate. It seems that when I do start meditating regularly, every time something out of the ordinary happens – I get a cold, or a really difficult job comes up, or a major event looms – I give up meditating. I’m talking about 5 or 10 minutes a day here, not anything heroic like half an hour.

But in all my attempts I’ve come to realise some important things.

There is absolutely no point in me waiting to meditate till 6 pm, which I’ve tried to do in the last year or so. It’s not that I can’t find the time then; my brain just isn’t in the right state for it.

The only thing that works for me is to meditate just after I get up in the morning and before I leave the bedroom. As I’m a morning person this is the best time for my brain; I’m definitely at my freshest, even if I haven’t slept that well. But the other reason is that, because I know if I don’t meditate immediately I won’t be doing it later in the day, it’s much harder to put it off and make excuses. I also know that it’s good for me to start the day that way before I compulsively go to my office and turn my computer on.

Another thing I’ve realised is I don’t have to wait for meditation benefits. I get them right away. Yes they’re subtle, but meditation is like daily medicine.

And the best thing? All the times I’ve stopped and started mean that when I start to meditate again, my brain already has some skill that it’s retained from the last time. So all the stopping and starting hasn’t been a total waste of time.

So far, I’ve managed to meditate first thing in my bedroom, for 10 minutes at a time, for five days in a row. I know that sooner or later there’ll be some crisis that may threaten this, but now at least I can’t fool myself and say ‘I’ll do it later in the day’. It’s first thing or not at all.

(BTW, the picture above isn’t of Sarah, but it was too appropriate to resist.)

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Reluctant lover of Big Love

I wrote this blog entry while the third series of Big Love was still playing in Australia, and then got caught up with writing about diet and food intolerance, so it’s a bit out of date. But I couldn’t stand to hang onto for another year so have decided to give it an airing now.

I have a big but in some ways reluctant love for the HBO television series Big Love.

This long-running drama series centres on polygamist Bill Henrickson and his three wives, Barb, Nicki and Margene. The family live in three neighbouring houses in a suburb in Salt Lake City, Utah, with their numerous offspring.

Bill and his wives are renegade fundamentalist Mormons who have adopted polygamy because they believe that producing as many children as possible will increase their favour with their ‘heavenly father’ in the afterlife.

With a fifth series in the pipeline and seemingly as popular as ever, the show details the never-ending dramas as Bill tries to financially care for his large family while hiding his polygamy from the world. There are also the tensions cooked up at Juniper Creek, the rural compound housing an oppressive Mormon sect that Bill and Nicki grew up in and are still entangled with. Dynamics among the three wives, the criminality of Roman, the patriarch of Juniper Creek, and the endless obstacles to Bill’s business ambitions are complicating factors.

I watch the show for the drama, but find myself wanting the family to ‘make it’ and stay together because they obviously gain strength from the deep bonds they’ve developed (in plural marriages, it seems, the women are married to each other as well, but as sisters rather than lovers, which of course begs its own questions).

The show is honest in its portrayal of human dilemmas, including sexual dilemmas, while also being, in its own way, conservative. Each of the personal conflicts ultimately gets resolved, although they may continue for several episodes and even from one series to the next (although I can only speak for what I’ve seen so far, and I’ve just reached the end of the third series, whereas the fourth has recently been screened in the US, and seems to herald some changes). But the resolution always occurs because the character concerned decides for themselves that they are going to ‘behave’. They make a choice based on their feelings of love and of belonging to the family group.

And that’s why the show is ultimately a fantasy – the characters must always make this conservative decision for the series to continue. In real life such intelligent, complex characters might well end up separating and living their lives on new and broader canvases. Or, as many women in polygamous marriages must do, they might simply continue with the status quo even if they were basically unhappy. The relationship conflicts in Big Love give a nod to realism (even if the interiors are usually preternaturally clean and ordered, and even if Margene looks impossibly fresh-faced despite having three toddlers to look after) but the never-endingly peaceable resolutions don’t (again, this may have changed in the fourth series).

Not only that, but the show goes to great pains to portray Bill’s plural marriage as one that is relatively enlightened. We know that not all polygamous marriages are as equitable as Bill’s, and deeply inequitable and often criminally abusive marriages take place on the Juniper Creek compound, sometimes between elderly men and teenage girls. Some of the wives on the compound are portrayed as living restricted lives of deep unhappiness.

In contrast, the individuals in Bill’s plural marriage are always free to leave if they choose – the only catch is that staying involves accepting the ‘principle’, which means having as many children as possible. That’s part of the show’s cleverness – the members of this marriage are portrayed as ordinary people in a very challenging situation. This impression is reinforced by the back story, in which Bill and Barb, the first wife, originally had a conventional marriage before deciding to embark on polygamy in order to live the principle and keep reproducing. Also, it’s constantly emphasised that Bill is in love with each of his three wives.

The makers of this series have been ludicrously clever in their ability to pitch it to a range of audiences. Mormons are a tiny minority in the USA, making up only 1.7 per cent of the total population, and probably mostly object to the show; but Big Love is likely to appeal to a wide swathe of non-Mormons who are religious in some way. According to Wikipedia, in 2008, 76 per cent of Americans identified as Christian; Protestants made up 51.6 per cent of the population, that is, they were a majority of the country’s population. Meanwhile, 3.9 per cent were part of non-Christian religious communities; this figure included Muslims and Jews.

The members of Bill’s marriage make huge sacrifices to maintain their complex arrangement. I’d imagine that many conservative Christians, and perhaps even Muslims and Orthodox Jews, might enjoy watching the show to receive affirmation for the sacrifices they themselves make for their religion, such as abstaining from alcohol, not using contraception, or marrying young to avoid having sex before marriage.

But the show’s target market is wider than that. Women who watch this show may think ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. But some men may watch it because they like the fantasy of having three wives. That relates to what I think could be another reason for the show’s attractiveness. Given the in-between status of this family, sitting somewhere between the oppressive world of Juniper Creek and the uncomprehending secular world from which they must hide their illegal arrangement, their situation has glaring similarities with much more progressive forms of polyamory. Surely this would be part of the subliminal appeal of the series?

Genuine polyamory has to hide in the USA just as polygamy does. An interesting documentary shown on Australian television last year featured an arrangement between a man and two women living together, all of whom were in love with each other – in other words, there were three sexual relationships going on. One of the women was a lawyer and she had to hide the nature of her relationship in her workplace, just as do the characters in Big Love.

But the interdependence that characterises the adult family members (when they’re not warring with each other) also reminds me of the first share house I lived in, a communal arrangement in which we ate and shopped together, and had a food kitty and a cleaning roster.

Communal share houses can have polyamorous undertones (mine certainly did) but don’t rely on polyamory as a structure for the relationships of the members. They offer a different version of adulthood from the one that involves breaking away from one’s family of origin by living in an adult sexual relationship. Share houses allow a form of adult cooperation that helps young people to separate from the family, but also enables a great sense of autonomy and freedom for those not yet ready to form lasting ties (of course, share houses may also involve established couples, and the arrangement may give rise to new relationships). And yes, share houses are, like polyamory, difficult to get right.

I think there’s something similar between this kind of arrangement and the way the family in Big Love are housed: the family live in three adjoining houses but are always in and out of each other’s homes.

The share house model is very much evident in the way the show is marketed. The youngest wife, Margene, has a blog in which she talks frankly (ie bitches) about the goings-on in the family. (The comments from viewers that appear on this blog suggest that some at least have trouble distinguishing fiction from real life).

These echoes of the share house no doubt help to explain why the show also appeals to a lefty feminist like me. But I think it may be the very lack of political correctness that is the clincher. I enjoy the drama of the continuing conflicts, but can ultimately blame the Mormon lifestyle for causing the conflicts in the first place, thereby avoiding the need to feel guilty about the show’s political unsoundness. I get to have my self-righteous cake and eat it too.

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Sins of Omission and Sins of Commission: My Not-So-Beautiful Flingette

I look forward to Easter because it’s like Christmas without the angst. The weather’s normally mild in Melbourne, the streets blessedly bare and silent, there are films in cinemas waiting to be seen. If I’m working I enjoy the break; if not, I suspend the feelings of guilt and envy that crop up during these times. I haven’t eaten chocolate for so long now that I’m almost oblivious to the foil-wrapped ubiquity of the Easter Bunny’s offerings. It doesn’t matter to me that everyone else is enjoying a chocolate feast (she says with not a tad of defensiveness).

As this Easter approached I was on the tailend of a rare flingette, with the Gentleman I wrote about months ago. We ‘bumped into each other’ on the naughty website again, and this time there would be no mucking around with the niceties. It was a strange experience, and a bit sad. I don’t regret it; but, as usual, this kind of limited encounter makes me acutely aware of what I don’t have, and what so many others do – a real relationship.

It was intense in its own way, but, ever slow on the uptake, it took me ages to realise that he – the co-flinger – was even more emotionally cut off than I was. I still have no idea what he thought of me – I didn’t receive one compliment from him, but then again, I don’t think I gave him one. We both held off any kind of self-disclosure, and approached the fling as if it was a series of one-night stands. Which in effect it was.

In fact, what I’ve come to realise is that he showed me something a bit disconcerting about myself.

At first his lack of questions about my life, and his lack of demand that we meet socially beforehand, simply seemed too convenient and lucky for words. (It was also a huge relief that he didn’t want to stay the night – I don’t sleep well alone, but with someone else in the bed the night’s a total write-off.)

I didn’t have to tell him about my food allergies, the circumstances of me working from home – he fitted in with my limitations, he fitted around me. It seemed a god-given gift to be able to just have the fling without him wanting to get under my skin, so to speak.

He was easier with this kind of arrangement than anyone I’ve ever known. As if that was the only way things ever were. As if this was how everyone conducted their sexual lives, impersonally, just getting on with it, and a polite chat afterwards to show that you had digested your food before getting up from the table.

But after the second meeting I realised that he hadn’t ever kissed me, not even a peck. I knew there must be a particular reason for that, that it wasn’t accidental. I asked him why on the third and last occasion, and he laughed in an embarrassed way, as if to say, ‘I knew this would come up sooner or later.’ He then confessed that he actually enjoyed the idea of the whole thing being totally anonymous. Not kissing me was a way to keep that fantasy alive, at least partially.

He had outplayed me. Asking for emotional space, for a level of the impersonal, I had received everything I’d wanted – and more.

But this revealed something about me, too – if he was a player, so was I. If I was uncomfortable with this level of emotional distance, then why had I picked him up on a website designed to facilitate just that? I'd never thought about myself as a player before, as someone who had sex for recreation. I’ve embarked on all my encounters with a search for love being part of the hidden agenda, even if the person concerned had no chance of fulfilling that particular brief. Of course I did the same thing with him, even against probability, but that’s certainly not how I acted.

It’s not that I have anything against sex as recreation; it’s just that experience tells me it’s impossible. Sex is an energy exchange, no matter how impersonally it’s carried out.

But I don’t think what I did was wrong either. I needed to do it, and even though I’m sad about not being in a relationship, I’m a lot less resentful and angry about it. Any kind of sexual oasis can have benefits that last far longer than the actual experience. I did have a good time, after all.

Yet his lack of self-consciousness amazes me even now. I can still picture him sitting cross-legged on the bed as I undress. It’s our second ‘encounter’.

‘It’s always awkward the second time’, I say. ‘The first time you’ve got nothing to lose, and later on you’ve gotten to know someone, but this interim period’s difficult.’

He looks mildly wondering, mildly curious, as if that kind of awkwardness is totally foreign to him.

‘So how do you get over it?’ he asks.

‘You don’t. You just have to live through it.’

Of course it couldn’t have continued to be casual indefinitely and after that particular, second episode, I was wondering if it could be something more, something long-term-ish, even if perennially low-key. But there were a few niggling issues (the not-kissing being one of them), and the crunch came at the following meeting.

We were sitting companionably on the couch afterwards, he was munching on shortbread and we were having quite a cosy chat about politics – intense political discussions were one of the things we had in common. Until ...

He was telling me about how BP had had backed a coup in Azerbaijan that overthrew the democratically elected government. I made a stock remark about BP probably being one of the companies funding the stream of climate denialism that’s now flooding the internet, not to mention the mainstream media.

He stared at me.

‘Oh no’, I said, smiling. ‘Are you …? Do you …?’

‘When scientists are disagreeing on a major issue, it’s time to step back and look at it objectively.’

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He was, of all things, a Denier. To put it more politely, a climate sceptic.

Polite and urbane as we were both trying to be, we discussed it for a while longer, as I yawned exhaustedly. Secretly, though, I had, I hate to say, more or less dismissed him.

I know that that’s hopelessly judgemental, and judgementalism is one of my major faults. What I was judging was his seeming inability to judge his own sources of information. It’s not that he wasn’t reading up and investigating and finding out for himself – clearly he was. It’s just that, if he’d come to the conclusion that human-made climate change was a crock, he was clearly going to dodgy sources to get his information. It was this lack of discrimination about the quality of sources that made me question his – well, his ability to discriminate.

In my defence, I also sensed a determination to hold onto his views similar in strength to mine. There was no way I was going to argue him out of this position, even if I did have decades of peer-reviewed climate science on my side. My scientific knowledge is as tiny as the problem of climate change is grave.

I couldn’t help thinking it was the sort of dilemma that the comedy show Seinfeld would have dealt with if it had continued into the noughties. Picture Elaine entering Jerry’s apartment for the umpteenth time, looking decidedly dejected as he holds the door open for her.

‘How did your big date go?’ he asks in his offhand way.

‘It’s over.’

‘Over? But you’ve only just met him!’

‘He was a climate change sceptic.’

Despite this outcome, I still enjoyed Easter. It is after all the season of the blob, the festival of doing nothing, a time for the worship of sloth. In fact, Good Friday is the day of the year that it’s easier for me to slack off than any other day. It’s almost impossible to be productive on that day, but for me it seems downright sinful.

The air is so still. Everything’s come to a halt. The busy street I live on is quiet. Luckily I had prepared myself for this urge to languor. The evening before I’d been trawling around neighbouring suburbs at the Holy Thursday equivalent of peak hour (much less frenetic than usual) looking forlornly for a video store. The tiny corner one I usually go to, a five-minute drive from my place, had mysteriously closed, with a sad For Sale sign on the door. I hate that kind of change – when some tiny piece of your life disappears and you have to figure out how to replace it.

Blankness was calling, the world was closing in on itself, and I was going to need distraction. I finally figured out there was a video store even closer to me in the other direction, and when I finally made it there the place was buzzing with the uncultured young.

And what a depressing little place it was. Video stores are always a bit that way with their dirty white shelves and cheap nylon carpet and relentless fluoros. This place was particularly soul-destroying on an Easter Thursday because it had the most limited selection I’ve ever seen – a slew of cheap-and-nasty action movies and unfunny-looking rom coms that clearly never made it to the big screen, in Australia at least, their blarey, cartoonish visuals screaming out their lack of real content.

I managed to grab a couple of thrillers, my favourite genre, and after watching one on Friday afternoon I wept through the mushy but emotionally grown-up Young Victoria. How lucky Victoria was to find a lover she was nuts about, who also happened to be incredibly geopolitically convenient (he was the nephew of King Leopold of Belgium). Where was my Albert, or even my Albertina? Either would do.

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