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by Boomert - The Weight of Silence by Catherine Therese 13 Jan 2010
This is a special memoir. It is written with great feeling, imagination, humour and originality, and shows a writer with a distinct view of the world within and around her. It tells the story of her first 16 years, her father’s alcoholism and violence, her mother’s silence, sisterly relations, puberty, front bottoms and friendships. And her imaginary friend Kylie, who ‘used to say the things [she] couldn’t’. Catherine Therese, she of the saints’ names, was the ‘odd sock’ of the family, prone to ‘storms’, and fascinated by her ‘innie’ belly button, which she loved to pick. ‘If I get to the end of me, can I undo myself and start again?’ she thought, before revealing something altogether more disturbing concerning fear. It’s not that what this memoir contains is all that radically different to other childhood memoirs—it is the way the author captures the fears and obsessions of childhood so brilliantly. Readers who like Barbara Hanrahan and Janet Frame will appreciate this book. Not everything works, but it’s an emotionally courageous and frank creative expression of childhood experience.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (April 2009, Vol 88, No 6.) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.

Author Biography: Catherine Therese
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Weight of Silence, Paperback (August 2008)