Review - Corpus

SSRIs: the battle of the narratives

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Heather Bauchop

British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, The Pill That Steals Lives, opens with a nauseating story: a mother kills her eleven year old daughter and ten year old son, and then turns the carving knife on herself. She wakes in the secure unit of a private psychiatric unit convinced that there are cameras trained on her every movement. She’s on suicide watch and diagnosed with psychotic depression.

The mother in the story is Katinka Blackford Newman. But it turns out she didn’t kill her kids – she hallucinated killing her kids. Newman had had a toxic reaction to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant.

When ritual is the best vessel

12 March 2018 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Medical anthropologist Dr Susan Wardell reviews Moon Circle: Rediscover Wildness, Intuition and Sisterhood by Lucy AitkenRead.

A moon circle is, by basic definition, a night-time gathering of women. Its roots as a cultural practice are very old, as old “as the ages”. Often outdoors, and comprising a mixture of symbolic activity and verbal sharing, the moon circle is making a resurgence in the contemporary West. AitkenRead’s book, unapologetically feminist in its goals, sets out to “rediscover wildness, intuition and sisterhood”:

We are purposely stepping into the river of womanhood that has twisted and turned throughout herstory.” – Lucy AitkenRead

For this kind of voyage, it seems ritual is the best vessel.

Clive James: “I am here now”

12 March 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Poet, essayist and all-round international man of letters, Clive James, was diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema in 2010. He wasn’t expected to survive long, but he’s still here, and writing the best work of his life. And this is largely, he says, because of death. There is nothing like intimations of your own mortality to sharpen your focus on what makes life worth living:

I am here now, who was hardly even there.”

In 2015 he published what he thought would be his farewell collection of poetry, Sentenced to Life. Last year, kicking on, as it were, like “an exhausted footballer with legs of lead”, he published another collection, called (with typical Clive James wit) Injury Time.

“Undying: A Love Story” by Michel Faber

12 February 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Michel Faber is the award-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories, among them The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin and The Book of Strange New Things. Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Faber’s family migrated to Australia in 1967 where he was educated and for many years worked as a nurse. Faber now lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.

In 2014 his wife, Eva Youren, died from multiple myeloma. Undying: A Love Story is a collection of poems that chronicles Faber’s grief. He wrote two of the poems while Eva was very ill, and most of the rest on the other side of her death, in the strange new world of bereavement – “a world”, he writes, “that did not have my dearest friend in it”.

I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.”

Books beyond loss

5 February 2018 Leave a Comment

Kirstie McKinnon

Loss is like a current. Like fish, we respond with instinctive movement, ending up where we’re going but not, perhaps, where we intended. For some writers, the waterfall propulsion of grief channels, over time, into extraordinary work. Here are some books eloquent on loss, but greater than that, they reveal nature, character and a profound sense of being in the world, being part of it.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Vintage books, 2014. Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and 2014 Costa Biography Award.)

The ignition point for H is for Hawk is the death of the author’s father. Macdonald is propelled by grief into a broken English landscape, wild as the bird she takes there to tame. Woven into the story is a biography of writer and would-be falconer T. H. White, which gives the narrative depth and mirror.

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“A Prescription for Action”

4 December 2017 1 Comment

Tree Cocks

A Prescription for Action: The Life of Dr Janet Irwin by Susan Currie tells the fascinating life story of New Zealand born and trained Janet Irwin, medical doctor and social activist.

Born in 1923, Janet’s childhood in the Hokianga was free-ranging, but not without significant challenges, which may have influenced her subsequent interests in medicine. From her mother, Lucy, Janet inherited a voracious appetite for reading. Her father, “Doc Smith” (or “GM” as he was also known) was a legendary and revered doctor in the Hokianga in the early part of the twentieth century, when life there was remote and co-operation arose out of shared hardship. He had come from a farming background in Scotland and, like other early settlers in the area, he could be described as having been “successful in villainy, public service and philanthropy”: he was not above breaking the law in pursuit of what he considered the greater good. He was also charming, warm and empathetic, characteristics shared by his daughter. GM was an iconoclast, as was Janet, who had the gift of forcefully challenging ideas without creating offense.
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