Hiding Places
‘She drinks coffee until she can drink wine and then she goes to sleep so that she can wake up and drink coffee until she can drink wine again. Is this not the story of every mother, she asks herself.’
Hiding Places is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby.
Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a ‘book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays’, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis. The result is a fresh, funny and deeply moving look at what it means to care and to create – at what gets lost or hidden in the process, and what is found or revealed. ‘It’s not what she says,’ writes Edmeades, ‘but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath.’
Resonant with, yet distinct from, the works of writers like Maggie Nelson, Kate Zambreno, Olga Ravn and Chris Kraus, Hiding Places is an inspiring read for anyone interested in the dangerous yet fruitful zones where life and art overlap.
‘Hiding Places is offbeat, leaky, humorous, fragmented and uncertain of itself. I enjoyed spending time with this spiky narrator: her anxieties, her obsessions, her kleptomania, her failure to comply. She is the bad mother in defiance of Truby King’s alarming and dysfunctional child-rearing rules, quietly rebelling and disintegrating inside a system that still echoes and replicates his admonishments. A fascinating and funny anti-hero.’—Tina Makereti‘This book is so smart. So honest. So funny. So provocative. So humane. So rapturously thoughtful. It is “please stop bothering me, I’m reading something really good” level of good.’—Emilie Pine
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Reviews and Interviews
'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.'
Emma Neale at the launch Read
About the author
Lynley Edmeades
Lynley Edmeades has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and a PhD in avant-garde literature from the University of Otago. Her previous books include As the Verb Tenses (OUP, 2016), Listening In (OUP, 2019) and Bordering on...
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Listening In 
As the Verb Tenses