MEMOIR
Woman of Substances
JENNY VALENTISH
BLACK INC., $32.99
For a Girl
MARY-ROSE MACCOLL
ALLEN & UNWIN, $29.99
The Good Girl of Chinatown
JENEVIEVE CHANG
VIKING, $32.99
"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent," wrote Joan Didion in Self-respect: Its source, its Power, a 1961 essay for Vogue. These three Australian memoirs ask how self-respect can be coaxed forth, in Didion's words, when, as a child, your capacity for healthy self-determination is almost shattered.
Shortly before starting her own newspaper, typed on a typewriter and distributed on roller skates, Jenny Valentish is molested by a 12-year-old boy, a family friend. "I had a cock in my mouth by the age of seven," she writes in Woman of Substance (and doesn't mince her words anywhere else in the book, either).
She suppresses the memory until she is 10. She starts drinking when she is 13 and by 15 she is "blind drunk every day after school". At 16 she starts a music magazine called Slapper: The Groupie's Guide to Gropable Bands. She starts taking drugs. At 21 she lands her first job, at a PR company in London, but is fired after her email offering to sell speed to her colleagues is forwarded to her boss.
In a book that is half memoir, half argument, Valentish seeks to explain how addiction is arrived at and dealt with differently by women. She is her own case study, her life explained by neuroscience, psychology and sociology.
Sexual abuse is one of the factors that leads to Valentish's drug and alcohol addiction. The second is depression, more common in teenage girls than boys and, perhaps, even more so in those from Slough – the famously dull London satellite town in which The Office was set and about which John Betjeman wrote his 1937 poem with the opening line "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough ...".
Valentish examines the way the menstrual cycle affects sensitivity to drugs and alcohol and the ability to quit; sexism at Alcoholics Anonymous, and how shame, as well as stealing, alcohol and sex, stimulates dopamine receptors. Quitting happens in fits and starts, then all at once, three years after she moves to Australia, in 2009.
Valentish's intelligence and determination zip through the book. She has a flair for simile: "It's like you're swinging from vine to vine of awareness," she writes in the chapter on the way blacking out affects memory, "and when you look behind you there's nothing there any more."
When Mary-Rose MacColl looks behind her she sees this: in Brisbane, shortly after turning 18, she has fallen pregnant with her teacher's husband's child. She has been in a sexual relationship with her teacher and the husband since the age of 16.
The couple insist that MacColl leave her impressive cadetship at Brisbane's Independent newspaper and head to a place they know about in Melbourne – run by a convent called St Catherine's – where she can give birth and give her child up for adoption. MacColl complies.
"To give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect," wrote Didion. If Valentish coaxes herself back into her own good graces with a journalist's dedication to fact, MacColl's path back to herself is an intensely personal confession – without the Catholic priests of her childhood – and a record for her daughter, to whom MacColl addresses notes throughout the text.
MacColl suppresses the memories of the abuse and her child for years. One day – still living in Brisbane, now a novelist, married and mother to two-year-old Otis – she catches the skin on her son's stomach in the stroller clip as she fastens him in. When they arrive home, she falls to the floor in the bathroom, shuddering and shaking.
This is where the book begins. From here, MacColl tells the story of her childhood and its aftermath. After returning from Melbourne, she writes, "I had no connection with myself at all". She drinks and develops an eating disorder – as Valentish's research might predict. Years later she becomes suddenly, inexplicably furious with those she loves.
For a Girl is catharsis on MacColl's terms. Floating is a prominent theme: MacColl treasures a photo of herself as a girl, smiling from a swimming pool; in therapy she draws three people in a bed, and a winged figure leaving; she develops a fear of bridges. "Secrets like this demand an airing," she writes. "If you allow them air, bring them up to the light, they float away."
Jenevieve Chang invites the reader to discover a happier secret – the life of a burlesque dancer in twinkling, thrilling Shanghai. But like MacColl and Valentish's stories, at the heart of The Good Girl of Chinatown is the reconciliation between what Chang calls "the arrow of childhood" and her adult sense of self-respect.
In Sydney, when Chang is a teenager, she comes home from a summer camp with love-bites on her neck. Her father, Sam, tries to hit her, as he has done before. She strikes him first, setting off a chain of events that leads to her sister being removed by child services and Sam returning to Taiwan.
Chang grows up to be a dancer and heads to London with the distinguished Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. "Meshing an intention with unique physicality held me in poetic suspense for the best part of my best days at dance school," she writes. "The body, and all its dormant dreams unfurling like the pages of a hymnbook – a datum point for making sense of the world around me."
After Laban, Chang meets and marries Femi, a yoga instructor. In 2008, they move to booming Shanghai, yet to be enveloped by the global financial crisis. Femi flourishes as Chang struggles to find work – she is foreign, but looks Chinese, and having one foot in each world bars her from both. She passes time at shimmering parties thrown by expats. She and Femi grow apart. When Chang is approached to become one of the Chinatown dolls – dancers at a new club that promises the glamour of old Shanghai – she hesitates for only a moment.
Chang's book is dance-like: charismatic and light on its feet, underpinned by careful, hard work. The Shanghai chapters take turns with those tracing the story of Chang's grandparents. "The rope of our story revealed itself in stages, knot by knot," she writes.
During World War II, Chang's grandfather's first wife died after being infected with plague by bombs dropped by the Japanese as they retreated from China. Later, as China fell to the communists, Chang's grandparents were wed following a decree that all single women marry a member of the communist party. The pair fled to Taiwan, where they had Eva and Sam.
In Shanghai, as Chinatown's promise of liberation falls apart – "The progressive sovereignty of neo-burlesque this was not," writes Chang – she recalls the moments leading up to her father leaving, Chang's first fierce attempt at regaining control over her body.
"It was not the nature of epiphany," MacColl writes in her book's final paragraph. "There was a long rough road ahead, given where we'd started, and no guarantee of anything at all." But the prize is worth the fight. As Valentish, MacColl and Chang know, and as Didion wrote, it is everything.