When author Debra Adelaide heard her friend of fifty years, Gabrielle Carey, had died suddenly at 64, Adelaide was in her kitchen and ‘crouched over the bench as if in pain and cried out Oh no, no, no, no no.’
Adelaide felt compelled to write her autobiographical fiction novella: When I am Sixty-Four ‘… to try to understand why Gabrielle was suffering and to honour her great contribution to life and to literature’.
Her novella is a profound and beautiful reflection on a lifelong friendship between two women writers. If it was music, it would be Gorecki’s Symphony No 3: swelling with majestic sorrow but also exquisite.
“Despite the sad subject matter, I don’t believe When I am Sixty-Four is a sad book,’ says Adelaide. ‘It celebrates life, it celebrates friendship. It celebrates books and writing and moments of humour.’
Author Debra Adelaide. IMAGE: supplied
The book is set in the final months of Carey’s life and flashes back decades to when they met as teenagers at school. They were the only students to complete the set readings before term started which tells you something about the foundation of their friendship.
In the last months of Carey’s life, the friends took long walks through their Sydney neighbourhoods as Adelaide tried to bridge the widening gulf between them.
The book evoked big questions about friendships for this reviewer. Should you stay in a friendship where you might feel like a somewhat weary life coach? Do you stick around for a friend who seems unwilling to help him or herself? Are we kidding ourselves to think our love and presence can help with a friend’s depression? Around 20 per cent of Australians experience depression so these questions affect many of us.
Elegant prose
When I am Sixty Four reflects on these topics lightly and deeply all at once: quite a trick. Written in elegantly concise language, Adelaide considers why a successful Australian author would end her life early, leaving behind two children and a grandson.
Full disclosure here: Gabrielle Carey was my first creative writing mentor and deeply influenced my own memoir. I was inspired by Puberty Blues, the brave, iconic book she co-authored.
The Carey I knew was vibrant and happy in her forties. In 2002, we eschewed computers and spent an entire day physically cutting (with scissors) 40,000 words from my 120,000 word monster of a manuscript while eating chocolate torte and drinking plunger coffee. It was one of the best days of my life. She taught me to sculpt the unformed clay of a draft into the shape of a novel.
This is my ‘truth’ of Carey. I perceived her as a successful, generous and seemingly tireless writer and writing teacher living in a heritage home in inner city Sydney with her partner and beautiful children.
Gabrielle Carey. IMAGE supplied
In her book, In My Father’s House she shared her privileged upbringing with educated, permissive, middle-class parents.
However, her parents separated when she was a teenager and Carey’s father committed suicide at 64. Carey dreaded meeting the same fate which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The year before she died, Carey wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about ‘being in a perilous financial state’ and that ‘depression hit hard’ following retirement from her job as a casual academic.
Tender
Adelaide paints a picture of Carey’s financial state that was perhaps not as perilous as Carey believed and where something deeper was a factor in this tragedy. The author uses achingly tender turns of phrase to describe Carey’s vulnerability as she lay depressed in bed: ‘… the quilt smooth over the tiny lozenge of her frame’.
For this reviewer, Adelaide’s book raises big questions many of us face in our middle years. Was it all worth it? Am I a success? What is success? Am I happy?
And why do some take great joy in simple things while others simply cannot?
Very Australian
Adelaide writes: ‘One of my greatest pleasures in summer was to wait until late afternoon to mow the lawn with my lightweight, quietly humming, lady’s mower, then sit outside with a cold beer and breathe in the chlorophyll.’
During one such afternoon, Adelaide writes that Carey sat on the verandah ‘tremulous from lack of sleep’ and ‘would not even have a beer’.
These reflections on the two friends’ parallel but increasingly separate lives are infused with this Australianness: observations of native birds, the nuances of really good fruitcake, long walks beside rivers (while stepping around Ibis droppings) and eucalypts brushing against house windows.
The only line that jarred for this reader, was Adelaide’s description of teenage Puberty Blues Carey ‘as wobbling on the tightrope between good girlfriend and cheap slut’. While this is framed as being within ‘the strictly coded social world of 1970s outer suburbia’, there is no equivalent slur for a sexually free young man so it stung to read Carey’s contemporary using those words.
Revealing
Overall, When I am Sixty-Four covers the major emotional territory of what it is to be a creative woman, a writer and a daughter in Australia’s macho culture and what it is to retire and critically examine the worth of your entire life.
There were times when I blanched at the private, painful conversations revealed in Adelaide’s book but Carey understood and lived by writer Phillip Roth’s credo that ‘Everything is material.’
Besides, Adelaide does more than just reveal: she subtly makes meaning.
The native birds who appear as minor characters throughout When I am Sixty-Four could be metaphors: for they are pretty, sensitive, watchful and vulnerable creatures, part of the Australian landscape and expert at flight and escape, just like Carey herself.
When I am Sixty-Four is published by UQP, retails for $34.95 and is out this month.
