On Thursday, 18 September, we held a book launch for Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades at the University Book Shop Otago. A massive thank you to everyone who joined us to celebrate the release of this wonderful new book. Emma Neale kindly launched the book for us. Here is her launch speech:
Fiona Moffat, Lynley Edmeades and Sue Wootton
My physical copy of Hiding Places was hand-delivered to my post box just yesterday, by Doug Lilly —valiant helpmeet to publisher Sue Wootton — and I have to say the real object was a revelation. I read Lynley’s searching, honest, intelligent, funny, troubling, confronting work on screen a couple of weeks ago, while waiting for the print version to arrive. And I read it at such speed and with such absorption, that in my mind (despite knowing the page count) it was about the size of, say, two Lynley Edmeades poetry collections. Complex, probing, poetry collections, yes: but still, feeling the heft and muscularity of the physical book made me stop and say, aloud, Wow. Yes!
Fragment by fragment, Lynley packs in serious substance here. At its core, the book is coiled, tough, bitter and sweet: the way an apple seed somehow contains all seasons: the flowering and fruiting tree; dry autumn leaves; and gothic winter twigs.
If I’m going to use the tree simile here, though I really need to talk about graft. Graft as in hard work, and graft as in hybrid.
Lynley’s genre-defying book grafts or splices together wildly diverse forms. From page to page, it spins like a tombola wheel, so we’re dazzled by the shift from tone to tone; and from story, to essay, to sent and unsent letters, to her grandfather’s medical records and to personal reflection.
There is what you might call confession; yet there is also deliberate evasion, as it sometimes overtly performs hiding, through using techniques like using black-out text. It also grafts all the forms I’ve just mentioned with quotations, literary criticism, diary-like fretting and notes on the writing process itself. In doing so, the book brings out into the open the intense effort behind several endeavours. Endeavours like scholarship and academia; creative writing; early motherhood, and the work of trying to excavate the why and the how behind periods of personal, family, and what we might call society-wide psychological disorder, or troubled mental health.
Although Hiding Places explores an array of other subjects, its exploration of maternal mental health strikes me as the most urgent. The more this is discussed, brought out of the various dark closets that shame and judgement still conceal it in, the greater chance many women and babies will have of survival. And I do mean survival; it’s not a metaphor. If we’re not honest about the huge psychic load, identity transition and physical transformations of matrescence, of motherhood, we will lose loved ones. It’s as devastating and as blunt as that.
So, yes, this book is deeply exercised by a major social issue — and it’s a book to take seriously. Its forthrightness will help many new mothers to feel less isolated. Yet I still want to wave my arms around like a Peanuts character, to make it clear how invigorated it is by funny, absurd moments too. And by a strong sense of a warm and loving partner, sharing the difficult load; by hilarious conversations with good friends; by the awakening cold splash of snarky, comical, honest quips — I want to call them bitchisisms — that speak social truths in a… is she going to go there??? She’s gone there! way. It’s also enlivened by the energy that Lynley has for the literary critical projects that lace through the book, such as her fascination for the author Kate Zambreno. It’s enlivened by some of the structural risks the writing both takes on — and clears, I think — like hurdles in an exciting steeple chase; and by Lynley’s steely determination to be as candid as possible, about everything from professional envy to masturbation and kleptomania. What a catalogue!! It is a courageous book, for the way it swings up to all kinds of social boundaries and gives them a sharp, satirical poke with an elbow.
Lynley Edmeades and Neil Vallelly
As Lynley writes at one point, ‘I want to un-hide my mess. I want to un-hide my madness.’ In its openness about this mess and the leakiness of juggling parenthood and career, art and teaching, it is immensely generous. As it tries to capture the discontinuities of the juggle, it also offers the reader plenty of space to pause and reflect. The moments of discomfort it’s likely to give some readers are also productive, in my view: they ask, what are you hiding, and why? There may be good reasons: but the explorations and exposures in the book help us to think these through.
There is so much more in Hiding Places, that I’ve had no time to cover, or uncover. To adapt Lynley’s epigraph, from Janet Frame, ‘I like to think of the content of a launch speech as a signpost to a world not even mentioned.’ But I do want to mention how grateful I am to Lynley, for stirring me up over the last couple of weeks, for making me think hard about everything from literary genre, to the links between theories of child-raising and the controlling violence of Empire; for making me look bravely at difficult phases in my own life. It felt like seeing through a new glasses prescription. I want to thanks her for writing with a fluency that made me lose track of time — in the best of ways. Most of all, I want to congratulate Lynley on the achievement of this shiveringly strong, magnetically reflective book. And I’d love it if you would all join me in that.
Find out more about Hiding Places here