I first met Georgia Blain in Sydney in 1998. She was promoting her debut novel, Closed for Winter, and we'd been scheduled to read back to back at an event in Paddington.
In a way it was odd we'd not met before. Although Georgia's early childhood was spent in Sydney, her teenage years were spent in Adelaide, and my mother and stepfather were friendly with her mother, Anne Deveson. Yet the three years between us and the fact she left Adelaide about the time I started university meant we'd never crossed paths before that day.
![Georgia Blain, daughter of Anne Deveson, has died after a battle with brain cancer.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170924191447im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/9/s/j/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtao7s.png/1481966295908.jpg)
I'd already read Closed for Winter, which had affected me very deeply. Partly that was because its landscape – the wintry, windswept beaches of Adelaide – was one I knew so well. But it was also because the sense of loss and grief that moved beneath its surface was so tangible, and so at odds with the beauty and control of the prose.
Yet Georgia herself was nothing like the novel. Instead she was smart, generous and possessed of a wonderfully black sense of humour.
Within a year Georgia published a second novel, the still-thrilling Candelo. Like Closed for Winter it was a book it was difficult not to read as a coded exploration of the aftermath of her brother Jonathan's descent into schizophrenia and suicide, a story explored to powerful effect in Anne Deveson's devastating memoir, Tell Me I'm Here. In the absences that haunt both books one senses a writer trying to make sense of paralysing grief, to process it into something if not bearable then at least controllable.
After Candelo came three more novels: The Blind Eye and Names for Nothingness (her least favourite of her books), and a young-adult novel, Dark Water. Yet around them Georgia had also begun to amass a body of autobiographical non-fiction, much of it focused upon her experiences growing up.
In some ways the book these essays became, Births, Deaths and Marriages, is the book of hers I admire most. Not just because her relatively unconventional childhood is so splendidly evoked, or even because it is often so devastatingly funny (her descriptions of birth classes remain one of the funniest things she wrote) but because it captures her in the process of negotiating a truce of sorts with her past with the clarity and intelligence she brought to all her work. This is perhaps given its truest expression in her exploration of her deeply troubled relationship with her father, the broadcaster Ellis Blain, but equally present in her more tangential depiction of her relationship with her brother, Jonathan.
I've always suspected Births, Deaths and Marriages unlocked something in Georgia's work, liberating her somehow, for after it her writing shifted registers, becoming simultaneously more personal and more expansive. No longer content to approach her subjects obliquely she began to write from life, exploring the stresses and contradictions that run through contemporary life with a directness that grants novels such as Too Close To Home that rare thrill of true recognition. So close, in fact, that in one of her final books she named her characters after actual friends, then forgot to change them until it was too late, necessitating a series of awkward (but hilarious) conversations.
Late last year Georgia called me, deeply distressed. She'd recently finished the edits on what was to be her final novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog, the plot of which orbits an older woman grappling with her imminent death from brain cancer. Yet she'd just learned her dear friend, Rosie Scott, had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Appalled by the idea Rosie's family might be upset she was considering trying to withdraw the book from publication. I told her I was sure they would understand. But only a week or two later I received a text message from her. She was in hospital. "Sometimes life really does bite you on the arse," the message began.
In the weeks after her diagnosis, Georgia turned to her partner Andrew who approached her illness with a seemingly bottomless well of kindness and positivity, and her daughter, Odessa, of whom she was desperately proud. She also began to write again. It was more difficult, she said – in another of the multiplying ironies that seemed to have overtaken her life the tumour was adjacent to the language areas of her brain, meaning she sometimes stumbled on words and found complex editing difficult – yet as with her speech I'm not sure it was discernible from the outside: her prose was as lucid and her thought as incisive as ever.
The pieces she wrote in these months are some of her best work. As with all her writing they face the reality of her situation with unflinching honesty, but they also display an awareness of the beauty of the everyday, of the ways in which the quotidian overwhelms the immense. "The idea of dying is just too big to hold in your head," she said to me one of the last times we spoke. "Every so often I remember, and it overwhelms me for a day or two, but then I fall back into people and things and keep going."