Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Paper Trail

by
September 2002, no. 244

Timepieces by Drusilla Modjeska

Picador, $22 pb, 229 pp

Paper Trail

by
September 2002, no. 244

According to the back cover of Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska’s latest collection of essays represents an attempt to follow the ‘paper trail’ of her own life, after ‘nearly thirty years of nosing in other people’s archives’. Readers who have enjoyed Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (2000) will find much to intrigue them in Part 1 of this collection, which is largely a series of intimate glimpses into her development as a writer. Like Helen Garner, writing and living for Modjeska are clearly two sides of the same coin, and both enterprises imply struggle, danger and passion. Poppy was arguably one of the most exciting books to appear in Australia in the 1990s. Modjeska’s descriptions of her efforts to find the right voice or voices for the book’s complex mix of biography, autobiography and fiction are especially fascinating. While her first book, Exiles at Home (1981), was ground-breaking, the gulf between its well-conducted research and the sophisticated self-conscious memoir that is Poppy is immense. How many graduate students must have the same experience of travelling ‘on forged papers’ in their academic work, of assuming a supposedly disinterested voice that ignores the personal ‘terra incognita’.

Timepieces

Timepieces

by Drusilla Modjeska

Picador, $22 pb, 229 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.