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The After Life: A Memoir by Kathleen Stewart

There’s no doubt in my mind that this memoir is excellent. The prose is literary with a reflective tone, and I enjoyed the fact that this book is not structured with a blow-by-blow commentary of the author’s life.

Published 1 May, 2008

after-life

The After Life: A Memoir (Kathleen Stewart, Vintage, $34.95, tpb, ISBN 9781741667271, May) ****

There’s no doubt in my mind that this memoir is excellent. The prose is literary with a reflective tone, and I enjoyed the fact that this book is not structured with a blow-by-blow commentary of the author’s life. Instead Kathleen Stewart, an acclaimed writer of novels, short stories and poems, focuses on one year: 1976. She invites readers to accompany her as she herself revisits and reflects upon this tumultuous year in which a number of events (mostly awful) played out: her relationship with a guy she refers to as Martin, her brutal rape, her mother’s desertion, her own suicide attempt and subsequent period in a psychiatric hospital. Oh, but that’s not all. Heck no. The year is rounded off with the suicide of her father, an autocratic man whom I found quite detestable. Stewart’s mother is presented as a remarkable yet flawed woman—nothing seems to please her. By the end of the book I didn’t like her. Neither did the doctor in the psychiatric hospital! The two women had such a disturbing, tension-filled relationship. This book is very bleak. Very good, but very bleak.

Julia Jackson is a freelancer reviewer and works at Readings in Carlton

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: kathleen stewart


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