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.”
Llewellyn Powell was a bright young Welshman who studied medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, emigrated to Canterbury in 1865 and started a medical practice in Christchurch. Dr Geoffrey Rice, the author of this short biography, explains that it is the first publication of a larger project to document the activities of medical men in Christchurch during the late 19th century. Although Powell died young, aged only 36, he had an interesting career, intertwined with different facets of early Christchurch.
I have been recommending this book to everyone. And those who have accepted my recommendation are now recommending it to others. Its story may at first seem to be a modestly low-key one, but it quickly proves to have a powerful impact, with resonances that will be personal for every reader.
I bumped into a childhood friend recently in a bar in Auckland. Ordinarily, I live in Wellington but I was on my way to Paris to start a new life. The recent surge in Covid-19 cases in continental Europe has necessarily put that plan on the backburner. Lily told me that her mother had written a book and that I ‘ought to read it. Not knowing what to expect, I came out the other side with an internal obligation to share what I had read. 
