Infidelity, sexual assault, domestic violence, literary battles and a family feud — it’s not a novel but award-winning author Charlotte Grimshaw’s explosive memoir. By Mark Broatch.
This story was first published in April 2021 and has been brought back after Charlotte Grimshaw’s column on her mother’s death.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So begins Leo Tolstoy’s sprawling novel Anna Karenina. But what if you are repeatedly told your childhood was happy and peaceful, but realise the truth, your truth at least, is markedly different? That perhaps your upbringing, to some extent already recorded in apparent fact and subtle fiction, was more chaotic, stressful and violent? And when you challenge the authorised version, you are told your ideas are delusions or fabrications?
Charlotte Grimshaw is one of the nation’s most celebrated novelists and short story writers, winner of New Zealand’s highest fiction award. But her latest work is something of a left turn. It’s a highly personal memoir that tells of her upbringing in a literary family, perhaps New Zealand’s first family of letters. Her father, Karl, CK Stead ONZ CBE, is the author of a stack of fiction, poetry and criticism and no fewer than three volumes of memoir, a former poet laureate, winner of the PM’s award for fiction etc etc. Fiction that, as the author himself has acknowledged in his memoirs, has liberally used autobiographical elements from his life and, to some extent, the lives of his family. Decades-long husband to Kay, his first and most loyal reader, father of three successful literary children, Grimshaw, arts curator and author Oliver, and Margaret, a publisher based in London.
A few years ago, Grimshaw began to push back on the official version, at first carefully, gently, amassing evidence. But the more she pushed, the more vehement came the denials.
Existential despair
The Mirror Book is many things: an examination of memory, an exploration of psychological mysteries, a plea for understanding. But much of it is a reckoning of an existential crisis. The catalyst, if there is one, is when Grimshaw is told, via a whispered, tipsy phone call from a wife of someone at work, that her husband, Paul Grimshaw, a high-powered Auckland lawyer, has been having an affair. She emails him.
The answer came back, surprisingly dramatic for him: “I’ve done a bad thing.”
After a confrontation, household projectiles, Paul leaves the family home.
During the busy week she was fine, but writes that on the weekends, when free time stretched ahead, she got the crazy idea that Paul was lost and, in “a strange, irrational search”, found herself looking for him around the city. She soon gave that up, but later saw him at her child’s football match and the grief of watching him walk away “bent me sideways”. Eventually, Paul came back. They reconciled.
If this was a novel or film, the affair would only be what story gurus call the inciting incident, which “radically upsets the balance of forces in your protagonist’s life”. For a while, she found it difficult to get past Paul’s betrayal. It reminded her of childhood distress. She writes, “When I was a child, my mother would shut her bedroom door on me, locking me out, and I would feel the same existential despair. I felt there was nothing holding me to the Earth, nothing between me and the cold universe. Now the abyss had opened up again.”
This set Grimshaw along the path of fundamentally recalibrating her past. She began to write about it, frankly, unsparingly about her parents, but being perhaps hardest on herself. She forensically investigates why she’d had no close friendships with women, an eating disorder and turning nearly mute at school. A sexual assault as a young teen by a grown man, her lawless youth and the unsolved hit-and-run death of a close friend, a violent, manipulative relationship with a much older man at 19, and, girding it all, what she sees as the blanket denial of her memories by her parents as she attempts to get closer to what had really happened.
Making an appeal
“The point of the book is that I was writing about a crisis and then thinking through what had gone wrong. Why was it such a crisis. There was some mystery, something very wrong,”
We’re talking in the comfortable family home in leafiest Auckland, her eight-year-old labradoodle, Philip, on her lap, Claudius the black cat mooching nearby and a large, bright Karl Maughan canvas over our heads. “So, as well as recording this crisis, I had the idea of trying to make a communication or an appeal, where I hadn’t been understood. I then thought of the book as an appeal for understanding from my family. And because it’s your family, you think if I set it out like this so carefully, so meticulously, there will be some understanding, some common ground. Of course, sadly,” – she laughs, as she does frequently; it’s warm, unguarded, infectious – “it turns out that that was very unrealistic.”
Her father’s response, she says, was along the lines of: Charlotte can wait until I’m dead and then she can write her account.
“My mother’s response … I have to just be frank about all of this now I’ve embarked on it; I related things in the book that I’ve never told anyone, which are very personal traumatic experiences. They knew the basics but they didn’t know a whole lot of stuff. My mother’s reaction is just absolute rejection: ‘It’s lies. It’s falsehoods.’”
She realised their realities weren’t likely to converge. “Karl and Kay’s way of thinking would mean they would see my description of events as evidence of a defect in me,” she writes. “For them, it was simple: I’d gone mad.”
Of course, no one’s history is absolute. We are all unreliable narrators, our perceptions and memories magnifying, minimising, confusing, inventing. Siblings and parents always have alternative versions. But some versions are closer to actual events than others.
Oliver said the book had been helpful to him, telling Grimshaw, “It’s a beautiful book, and these are my memories, too.” Margaret tended more towards the post-mortem publishing approach, she says.
Her parents, though in their late eighties, are alive and kicking and she wanted to communicate to them without requiring a séance, she jokes. “And at some point you just get sick of being told what to do. But I’m certainly very sad that they are not happy with the book. I am the opposite of indifferent about the reaction.”
Is it more honourable to bring these things up when people are alive? “I do think that. Although they don’t thank me for that.” She laughs. “They say, f--- you!
“I absolutely love my family,” she says. “My intention or my hope was really unrealistic. Karl said that I have exaggerated in the fashion of the moment, which is truth writing.” She laughs. “My reply to him was, ‘As you know, not only have I not exaggerated, I’ve spent months taking out true details to make it more bland.’”
Free-range parenting
Her parents were engaged left-wing liberals, non-conformists; they protested against the 1981 Springbok tour as a family.
She and her father were close when she was younger, sharing jokes and games. She found his take on reality “always bracing, cogent, original, rigorous”. She admired his poetry, and his bravery. “He’s always been intellectually courageous. Admirably so.”
But at home, although he could be warm and funny, Karl was a disciplinarian, Grimshaw writes. “When there was family disharmony, Karl’s response was either to react with rage or to evade. He valued order: the tidy, aesthetic house, the timetable and ceremony of meals, the clipped garden, the cleanliness and moderate living – no excess.” His rigid overseeing of the division of food, even into adulthood, and attitudes to weight contributed to a teenage eating disorder, she suggests. “The prevailing family narrative, enforced by him and by Kay’s reverence, excused his anger, honoured it as part of his forceful male brilliance, and so we dealt with it, year after year, and had to participate in defending and admiring it.”
In the house, when we were kids, he laid down the law aggressively, she says, while Kay was lax about order and rules. Parenting was free-range. “As a young teenager, I could hang out in central Auckland at three in the morning if I wanted to, and Kay would listen to my anecdotes of street life with apparent enjoyment.” She writes, as well, of the death of her close friend Louis Dale in a hit-and-run, of underage drinking, wrecking phone booths, spray-painting walls, even setting fire to the odd car.
“It took me some time to unlearn this uncanny lack of empathy, this blindness. I had the civic sense and empathy of a person raised by wolves.”
When Oliver went off the rails as a teen, their parents were oddly resistant to the idea of “guidance, almost as if they shied away from it”, she writes. “Neither seemed to understand how destructive all the trouble and chaos had been. At [the childhood home in Parnell], while the parents were non-conformists intellectually, the children had gone troppo, and the end result was serious damage.”
How much was her parenting a reaction to that of her parents?
“Every single step of the way.”
When she had children, she suppressed details of her misdeeds and tried to ban Kay from telling them “funny stories” about her. She pushed education, as Karl did, encouraging them to empathise with people, including teachers. Her parents probably found such “revisionist suppression of my early wickedness fraudulent and hypocritical, and didn’t appreciate the motive: I wanted to protect my kids”, she says.
Karl smacked on occasion, as did many parents in the 70s, something she refused to do. “On a personal level, with children, if you bully and hurt and smack and humiliate and all that, it’s a bad way to run a family.”
Valid protests
Writing the memoir was complicated by the fact that Karl has for decades used real-life moments, people and conversations in stories and poems. As has Grimshaw, she acknowledges, including characters, fights, a sofa full of banknotes in Provocation and a storm at sea in Opportunity. Karl taught Grimshaw how to frame a story. “I knew how to create a composition, shape it, make it orderly and beautiful.”
At her childhood home, where the dinner party guests included Janet Frame, Frank Sargeson, Barry Humphries, Fleur Adcock, Kevin Ireland and Marilyn Duckworth, everything was regarded as “material”. At one point while writing the memoir, Grimshaw remembers a “puzzling, slightly chilling” short story by Sargeson, entitled An International Occasion, written when she was three. Set in a boarding house, it features an irascible Swede named Karl, a woman called Lottie and Coral, Lottie’s tiny “Māori-dark” child. Coral is left in the care of Lionel, the lodger, who has a predilection for underage girls.
Grimshaw was often mistaken as being Māori, as was Kay, who she resembled as a child. “I tried to get a fix on the haze of my childhood. Were my recollections real, or had I read them in a book? This is the strangeness of a whole life lived in fiction.”
In the second volume of his memoirs, You Have a Lot to Lose, Karl writes of the family: “There was a minimum of piety among us, tears but not too many, shouting but not too much, some songs, some recitations from memory, and endless jokes.”
“I wanted to ask about this,” says Grimshaw. “Why was a ‘minimum of piety’ important? What were the pieties ruled out in favour of endless jokes? How much would be too much shouting, how many tears would be too many?”
In what Grimshaw says is a rare concession, Kay recently said: “We weren’t a normal family, were we?” But what family is normal, Grimshaw asks, and what does “normal” mean? “For most of my life, I believed we were a normal family, she writes, or at least that we were only unusual in ways that were positive, that made us interesting. When I was growing up, I often felt distressed, inflamed with misery and anxiety. I could be driven wild with frustration at not being heard or understood, and, because I was articulate, Kay took to calling my outbursts ‘raving’. She would say in a breathless, fearful voice, ‘Look, she’s raving again, Karl. She’s mad.’”
Tensions had risen to a boil due to her increased questioning of the family history and changed outlook. “I felt the force of my literary family’s reaction: their dismay, incomprehension, occasional anger. I had become alien, charmless and, worst of all, a feminist. They accused me of humourlessness, of being in thrall to bogus shrinks. They urged me to come to my senses.”
They were suspicious of feminism, of Me Too. “Karl and Kay’s dispute was with the mob rule of social fashion, the howl of the vox populi. They objected to the tyranny of wokeness and purity tests, to the fact that reasoned argument was met with irrational outrage.”
Where is the girl, Karl would lament, “who had such a clear sense of reality and its boundaries and such a marvellous sense of humour – replaced by this scolding – as it seems to me – fantasist?”
“Where is the girl who …? It was the sentence that roused up the writer in me, and made me think that no matter where it led me, or what trouble I got into, I would formulate some kind of response.”
This, I note, sounds not unlike Karl: the artist would do what was needed no matter the consequences.
“I think if you write a book, you have to write it in that spirit.”
In order to understand all this, she consulted a psychologist, “who made a statement that would spell trouble, if only I’d known it at the time. The psychologist – Grimshaw was pressed into seeing a woman – said: ‘Telling your story is existentially important.’” She realised what is existentially important: to be heard and understood, to have a listener affirm it, to know the mind is not alone. You are not an idealised character in someone’s fiction; you are real. Your literary family is not a work of fiction; they are real. What you have seen and heard and experienced is real. Your protests are valid.”
Charming menace
Grimshaw writes of slowly losing the ability to communicate with girls and women from about the age of 14, in a mysterious process, which also meant she stopped speaking at school. She became unconfident in interpreting conversations, looking to her younger sister to interpret an interaction. That took years to overcome.
She told the therapist about her sexual assault at 13, by a 40-something pool attendant. In the book, she relates the story in three paragraphs. He flirted, wrote her love letters and gave her photos of himself. She showed Kay the letters and photos, which Grimshaw found comical. Kay wasn’t alarmed, she says. “When I was still 13, he pulled me into the first-aid room at the baths, announced we were to be married, and proceeded to behave, as he grandly put it, ‘as my husband’. If I’d complained to the police, he would have been charged with rape.”
“The episode,” she writes, “may have contributed to my sense that I didn’t have any rights. I wasn’t off-limits or inviolable; just the opposite. I told no one at home, judging that a report would be regarded as off-putting, embarrassing, that the disapproval would land mostly on me.”
So, she assumed there wouldn’t be great sympathy. And now? “There hasn’t been. Nothing.”
Grimshaw trained as a lawyer. When she was 19, she had a relationship with a successful criminal lawyer she calls Alex who was 18 years older. He was charming and clever and had expensive tastes. But he was violent and manipulative, a masterful gaslighter before the term came into common use. At one point, he punched her in the face repeatedly, injuring her so badly that she had to tell a lecturer she’d been in a car crash.
She writes, “I had no one to advise or help me. I felt Karl and Kay would have been embarrassed if I’d told them what was going on; they certainly wouldn’t have wanted to ‘interfere’.”
What did they know about the relationship? “They knew that we had a tempestuous relationship and fights. But they were in Europe when some really bad things happened. This is the first time I have related that to anyone.”
It was a terrible relationship, she says, but, like everything, it was complicated. “The other thing was that he was a really interesting person. He was often really funny, really clever. But he also had some very bad ways of behaving.”
Some traits of Alex, who has since died, appeared in her fictional prime minister, David Hallwright, in 2010′s The Night Book: “the skill at power games, the attractiveness, the elegance, the charming menace”.
She stayed with Alex, she says, because she was trying to get it right. “I could never have got it right. That was my naive young self. Also, I loved him. So I was sort of trapped.” She also writes: “I also kept standing up to him; I never stopped.”
Unstoppable infidelity
One area where versions of events loudly clashed was Karl’s infidelities. He has owned up to them, in the memoirs, but they seem rare and fleeting. In the book, she speaks of his “unstoppable infidelity”. “It seemed each new novel told the story of a new covert relationship.”
Kay usually shared details of the affairs with Grimshaw, she says, who writes about her mother at one point lying on the floor in grief. Grimshaw confronted her father about a woman he’d mentioned in his memoirs without noting that he’d had an affair with her, something that was common knowledge in the family at the time, she says. He said, “I didn’t have an affair with her.” When she disputed this, he insisted, “You’re wrong. You get these things wrong all the time.” She checked this recollection with Kay, who said, “What? Of course he had an affair with her!” Yet after Paul’s affair, Kay remarked, “so much fuss about infidelity”. What’s going on?
“That was a bad moment,” says Grimshaw. There’s a long pause. “Well, she was rewriting history, I suppose, but she was also not empathising.”
Paul has read the book, but her three 20-something children, Madeleine, Conrad and Leo, have not. “He’s been remarkably positive about it, all the way through, no objection. I keep saying to him, ‘Do you think I should do this?’ and he says, yes, yeah, do it.” People get through a crisis and they move on, she says. “That’s really true that you can come through something like that and go on even better.”
The Listener emailed questions to Karl Stead about the claims in The Mirror Book. We wanted to know, as a writer and the father of a writer, did he understand why Grimshaw felt she had to write it? What he thought about her description of “a highly educated man who had a towering intellect, a raging temper, a complete lack of marital fidelity and a wildly sensitive nature”? His and Kay’s thoughts on Grimshaw’s depiction of their parenting? If they had rather Grimshaw waited until after they had died to publish it or whether he’d wanted her, as she says, to rewrite it in a way that was more celebratory? What they knew about her sexual assault at 13, and the violence of her relationship with “Alex” and their reaction now?
His response in full: “Kay and I both love Charlotte dearly. We are huge admirers of her work and wish her well always.”
Grimshaw says going to the psychotherapist and telling her story changed her brain. “As I say, I was like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, scared of boring her, so I wanted to make it a good story, but it was all true. That changed, first, the way that I related to her, and then by extension it changed the way I began to relate to the world. I am not making this up: I really experienced a change, I suppose I would say, in my brain.
“When you start reading psychology it’s all about attachment, isn’t it? So I became attached to this person and, by extension – it really works – I am different in the way I relate to and perceive people around me, particularly women. But the way to achieve that is telling the story. Because human beings are social creatures and the way to have a connection is to communicate with each other. It is fundamental. What I’m describing is an actual lived experience. I can’t be bothered with all the mindfulness and finding yourself. This is a much more immediate experience that I had, that I wanted to write about.
“I went there rather in desperation because I had been led to believe all that was bullshit. I put it in the book that [Karl and Kay] had a dim view of the profession of psychiatry, partly based on Janet Frame’s experience. Which was completely reasonable because she had a terrible time at the hands of that profession.”
But isn’t that partly what fiction does, enquiring into psychology and character?
“Well, this is what I say in the book is a mystery: why did a literary family, who should have relished the details of psychological states, reject an inquiry into things such as family dynamics?”
The opening incident of Anna Karenina was also an affair. The husband thinks: “Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault – all my fault, though I’m not to blame.”
Does Grimshaw think differently about life and writing, now? “I think I’ll just be the same. What’s changed is the way I interact with other people.”
Will she keep writing fiction? Will this book change how she does it? “I had an idea the other night for a novel. I dunno if you need to be f---ed up to produce your great works.” She laughs. “I might be far too well adjusted to ever write fiction again. I hope not.”
The Mirror Book, by Charlotte Grimshaw (RHNZ Vintage, $38) is on sale.
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