Non Fiction

While reading Notes to John I wondered about the words commonly associated with Joan Didion’s style – verve, discipline, precision, breathtaking diction (she is described as capturing the American 1960s and 1970s like no other writer). Notes to John, a posthumous publication of 150 pages made up of notes Didion made following a series of therapy sessions with her psychiatrist, contains clarity and acerbic wit in places, but in general is made up of writing that is dull, repetitive, and achingly private. Didion, who died in 2021, appears to acquiesce to her psychiatrist, Roger McKinnon. His interpretations of her life are often presented as clichéd banalities and Didion tussles linguistically with him without her usual cutting analysis and humour. It is as if in these notes she has given herself over to the supposedly greater power of psychiatric knowledge and in the process become less sagacious. The sessions cover grief, confusion, the indominable wish to understand more about oneself, and how to manage family traumas. But does the writing add anything to Didion’s body of work? I think not.

Every now and then, a truly profound book appears on a profoundly important subject. Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss is one such book.

With more than two decades of experience in interviewing at SBS and the ABC, Kumi Taguchi knows how to craft a person’s story and build a reader’s sympathy. The Good Daughter, her first book, is a memoir. Here she looks inward, transferring these interviewing skills to herself as the subject.

New Zealand/Aotearoa is a small country, with a population of roughly five million people, but as former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enthuses in her memoir A Different Kind of Power, it regularly punches above its weight. Not that she is one to toot her own horn, at least in an obvious fashion, but let’s take her prime ministership as a vivid case in point.

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

Ron Chernow is a renowned journalist and bestselling biographer, whose best-known work is probably Alexander Hamilton (2004), the main inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American musical (2015). Chernow’s latest book joins several acclaimed biographies of Mark Twain that have appeared in recent decades, including Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume Life (2018, 2019, and 2022). The complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, also in three volumes, was published in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Twain dictated much of this to Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorised biographer and literary executor. As Chernow reflects, ‘The challenge for Paine, as for all future Twain biographers, was that Twain was peerless at bending the truth.’

In literary careers, straightforward narrative arcs are less the rule than the exception. A writer can begin with a resounding debut, only to stumble at what in the music business is called the ‘difficult second album’. Authors can change genres and audiences; fail at achieving significant sales figures; succumb to hostile reviews, or simple indifference. Miles Franklin expressed it best in her novel title My Career Goes Bung (1946).

It is a remarkable fact that our political leaders’ dogged pursuit of ‘national security’ through the United States alliance and the costly and controversial AUKUS agreement seems to be making Australians feel rather more insecure, indeed downright anxious, feelings exacerbated by the elevation of the mercurial Donald Trump to a second term as US president. 

When American Verena Koehler and Russian Zinaida Duvankova swapped recipes for Mexican-style beef and piroshki in the early 1950s, it didn’t seem that either were aiming to spark a political discussion. The pen pals were curious about each other’s food and lives, and the everyday differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet they soon saw similarities. Koehler remarked on a woman’s need for simple, fast recipes when she both works and carries out domestic labour at home. Duvankova agreed – even as a Soviet state official, she completed a full day at work and returned home to all of the housework. As she wrote to Koehler, ‘You are a woman, and can well understand what it means to attend to a family of three.’

It is common today for historians to describe what they do as telling stories about the lives and events of the past, using the narrative techniques that they share with fiction writers: describing place, weather, clothes, the set of a leading character’s chin, and so on. But as a disciplined, evidence-based enquiry, history writing is also about argument and interpretation.