Family of Fiction
Book Review
The Mirror Book
by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2021. 316 pp. $38)
Reviewed by Lindsay Shelton
Charlotte Grimshaw’s fascinating and relentless family memoir is not only a revelation about life with her famous father C.K. Stead, it’s also a constructively challenging and confronting consideration of the contradictory realities of family life.
She fearsomely and movingly compares the differences between her family’s public face — “the lovely childhood … a house full of books” — and her private experience.
“The family story was, in some ways, mysterious,” she writes. “I believed everything she [her mother] said until I was in my thirties, when I started to get a sense of smoke and mirrors.” At first Grimshaw decided not to question it. But when she entered the third stage of her life she realised she was not two selves. “I was one, and I would be stronger when I bought my selves together.” As she got older, she “puzzled her way to a conclusion: all was not as it seemed.”
Grimshaw had read and admired her father’s novels and especially loved his poetry. In his novels she recognised “echoes of experience denied in real life, sublimated, turned into an acceptable form — into art.” When she began writing her own stories, her father was warm and encouraging. He told her: “It’s material … Go and write a story about it.” And then she realised that she was telling true stories about “a whole life lived in fiction.”
She describes how she challenged her father for using aspects of her life in his novels. Then, when she published a short story using aspects of her own family life, she was filled with guilt and sadness.
“I couldn’t reconcile the urge to translate these family difficulties into fiction with my place in the family. All my questioning, exploring what it was about the family that was so strangely rigid, so enamelled over with denial, had made me the black sheep … So much had been passed over in silence for so long.”