THE UNAUTHORISED VERSION
‘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?
“This uncanny lack of empathy, this blindness… I had the civic sense and empathy of a person raised by wolves.”
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,
