A memoir that speaks to the social moment

MEMOIR
My Year of Living Vulnerably
Rick Morton
Fourth Estate, $34.99

Poetry, as a rule, has the benefit of brevity. It therefore takes Philip Larkin just eight words — “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” – to convey the central idea that fills the first two books by Australian journalist Rick Morton.

To be fair, Morton’s beef is pretty much exclusively with his dad, though you sometimes wonder why he lets his very much beloved mother off so lightly. As the new book begins: “When I phoned my mum, Deb, to tell her I was writing a book about love she was overcome immediately by wheezing laughter. �?What you?’ she managed to ask, although the emphasis on �?you’ was long and made it sound like it had been shouted by a ghost on a passing skateboard.”

Two things here. First: Morton’s relationship with his mother, while based on unimpeachable devotion, seems, on the basis of this rather soul-crushing response, to be as worthy of therapeutic investigation as the author’s poisoned relationship with his self-absorbed and ultimately absent father. The other: writer Morton’s often fractured — and in this book extensively explored — relationship with simile … why the skateboard?

My Year Of Living Vulnerably is a series of long, and often rambling reflections that have their roots in the traumatic young-life tale first aired in Morton’s One Hundred Years Of Dirt. The book begins with a critical grain of self-knowledge, that the damage done to the young Morton has manifested in later life in a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, “which is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved me the most during childhood didn’t”.

The book fleshes out from there, this old lovelessness coupled to a dawning self-knowledge at its core, as Morton attempts essays on subjects that range from “Touch” to “Dysfunction” by way of “The Self”, “Forgiveness”, “Animals”, “Beauty”, “Loneliness”, “Kindness”, “Masculinity” and “Doubt”. The cumulative endeavour is to frame an inquiry into the nature of love.

There is great writerly ambition in the structure, and often it carries you. The force of Morton’s honesty, his readiness to bare and question himself can be compelling; his voice is frank and unfussy, and the pursuit is noble. The social moment craves this kind of investigation: men prepared to examine their inner selves, to interrogate the emotional universe and find a new path for maleness within it. Fittingly then, Morton is at his best when tackling “Masculinity”, a chapter in which the author cuts to the fundamental issue of both this book and his life: “I was not loved and I did not love because that was not my experience of masculinity.”

A new masculinity, he argues, requires an embrace of vulnerability, almost the antithesis of the traditional expression of maleness. “In the animal kingdom, exposing our soft underbellies is often a sure path to death or injury ... Softness is weakness. Actual death, social death – it’s all the same. We fear it.” Morton’s conclusion, to embrace this fear and resolve in spite of it to explore vulnerability, comes with a compelling flash of insight. “Choose to do this. There is liberty in it.”

But first a teetering balance of risk and reward. So few men – as the evidence male violence and emotional stricture would suggest – seem capable of taking that plunge into vulnerability, and therefore love. “Some people,” Morton observes with a sober wistfulness that pulls the reader up short, “spend all their allotted time on this planet wondering what that freedom might feel like.”