Review: Barbara Else’s memoir explores gender roles and social expectations
Else shopping with her mother in Wellington in 1950. Photo / Supplied
The famous expat Hungarian intellectual and writer Arthur Koestler opined that people wrote memoirs and autobiographies “for two main reasons: the chronicler urge, or the ecce homo [behold the man] motive”.
The first focuses on external events; the second – behold the (wo)man! – on internal experiences. So I declare Barbara Else’s Laughing at the Dark to be an ecce homo chronicle, stepping agilely and often between the “Great World” and the personal, truly great world.
Among other things, it’s a nuanced exploration of gender roles, social expectations, the juggling to be good, whole and honest. Else encounters such issues early, with her mother’s “quietly refusing to do what you’re told”; her own wagging from Sunday School, “fed up with being good”; her primary school realisation of the compromises and complexities of conventional virtue.
At university in Dunedin, she meets virtuous, hard-working medical student Jim Neale. They bond temperamentally. They try to bond physically on an interisland ferry, whose fittings refuse to co-operate. He proposes while she’s having metal screws inserted in her ankle.
Two daughters later, with his career on the rise and hers on hold, they go to San Diego, where she’s expected to be the woman behind the man.
Things start to creak and crack. Back in New Zealand, he tells her, “I don’t have to respect you; you’re my wife.” He doesn’t mean it as a joke. He can be sensitive; he can also be cartoonishly sexist. She’s begun writing – plays and short stories – and he finds this either irritating or offensive.
At a New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN) meeting, Barbara meets fiction writer Chris Else. He spends the evening gazing “sadly and not at all offensively” (great adverbs) at her legs. He likes her work and women’s work in general. She starts to realise how she more than likes him.
Interspersed with fraught, tight passages about the battering and sometimes incomprehensible cancer treatments she’s endured since 2020, the story paces forward, in short vivid scenes and often in an urgent present tense, towards the hinge in her life as she leaves Jim.
The writing is clipped, energised. Anecdotes spark through the pages, some comic, some chilling. There’s the cat that uses a chamber pot; the loss of her fingerprints from chemotherapy.
She drives away from her husband: “It is awful.” Good people are hurt, and Else acknowledges it. She eventually moves in with, then marries, Else, and the second half of Laughing is mostly the narrative of a varied and successful literary life.