Memoir

White space of the unknowable

Item: Life with Birds
Author: Sarah Gory

A daughter’s fragments of memory

by Sarah Gory •

September 2022, no. 446

Life with Birds: A suburban lyric by Bronwyn Rennex

Upswell, $29.99 pb, 204 pp

Memoir

White space of the unknowable

A daughter’s fragments of memory

by Sarah Gory •

September 2022, no. 446

Ostensibly, Life with Birds is about the author’s search for her father, a Vietnam War veteran who died when she was young and whose story she hardly knew. As I read it, though, I was reminded of a line from Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal oral history The Unwomanly Face of War (2017): ‘Women’s stories are different and about different things.’ In the end, Life with Birds is less about men and war than about the women left behind – in this case, three daughters and a wife – and the shape of their lives in the wake of his silence, and then his absence.

Sarah Gory

Sarah Gory is a writer, editor and researcher. She has worked in leadership positions in the arts for the past two decades, most recently as Managing Editor of un Projects. Sarah’s creative non-fiction and art criticism has appeared in various Australian journals and magazines, including Meanjin, un Magazine, and The Lifted Brow. Her short story ‘Leaving’ was shortlisted in the 2019 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and in 2021 she co-edited the AMBLE issue of Cordite Poetry Review with Elena Gomez. She is also the co-publisher of imprint Common Room, with Paul Mylecharane. Sarah is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and lives in Naarm/Melbourne with her family.

Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ was runner-up in the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize.