June 22nd, 2024Gripping survival tale of sibling abuse
My Father’s Suitcase is described as a gripping tale of resilience and survival that offers hope to others who have experienced family violence and suffered at the hands of a sibling.
The book is a memoir which explores not only the troubled relationship between author Mary Garden and her younger sister, Anna, who died in 2023, but is also a big slice of social history of New Zealand in the 50s and 60s.
And while Mary may have started with anger about her sister, that changed as she wrote and her anger moved towards those around her who enabled the sibling violence to continue.
“I knew I had a focus on my sister’s treatment of me and this whole nothing of sibling abuse, it’s a huge missing part of family violence, but it is also about the dysfunctional family unit it exists within,” the Castlemaine resident and prolific feature writer, said.
“As I was writing I became less and less angry with her and by the end I felt quite compassionate, she had such a shit life. I mean, my mother used to say in front of Anna, ‘isn’t Mary pretty’, or ‘if only Anna was more like Mary’.
“And then I felt enraged about all those people who enabled it, the bystanders, all those people who knew about my sister’s violence and didn’t protect me.
“People say writing can be cathartic but I had already done a lot of therapy and work on my sister, so for me it provided more clarity and insight.”
My Father’s Suitcase grew out of her second memoir, Sundowner of the Skies, a biography of her aviator father, Oscar Garden, which was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s History Award 2020 for a book of international significance.
Her first book, The Serpent Rising, a memoir of her years entangled with various gurus in India in the 1970s, won the High Country Indie Book Award 2021.)
“In 2005 I did my first article on my father, who died in 1997 and had been a famous aviator. I did a feature article but when it was published it just exploded and I got emails from everywhere asking if I could write a book.
“I thought there was no way I could write a book but people pounded me for years and I started a book on my father and got a research grant, and I just hit a brick wall.
“I had a lot of self doubts, and of course I hated what my father had put my mother through, but I eventually went back to uni and did an editing course.
“Unfortunately I got a high distinction so I ended up doing a diploma and then a wretched PhD on journalism and the use of blogs and Twitter. And I thought if I can do this 80,000-word PhD I can do this book on my father, so I whipped it out really quickly and put a whole personal thread through it.”
Sadly, Mary’s publisher was not keen on the final three personal chapters, asking Mary to concentrate on aviation, and left much on the stone, so to speak.
Happily what was left became the start of her new book, My Father’s Suitcase, although some people told her that with Covid happening, no one wanted to hear about trauma.
“But I talked to many people and people do, so my book is not really my book, it is their story too, things that resonate with many people.
“And I just sat down and wrote it, it literally just poured out. So much so I had to see a hand therapist. And it turned out not to be just my difficult relationship with my sister but it includes the social and cultural history of the time in New Zealand.”
My Father’s Suitcase is available at all bookstores with signed copies at Paradise Books in Daylesford.
Words: Donna Kelly | Images: Contributed
