Night, Ma
by Elizabeth Knox

In early 2008, writer Elizabeth Knox was feeling ‘calm and solid.’ She had been awarded the U.S.-based Printz Honour prize for Dreamquake, the second of her Dreamhunter duet; she was due to appear at book festivals in Canada; the film version of The Vintner’s Luck was in production in France; she was working on her next book. Then, everything unravelled.

Her sister – imaginative, fearless, curious Jo – has to be hospitalised in a psychiatric wing. Her ‘conversationally adventurous’ mother is diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Her husband’s brother is deliberately killed in Rarotonga. Seven years later, she writes: ‘I set out to write a memoir of a three-and-a-half year period of calamity after calamity, in rapid succession, like a maul of rocks in a river gorge.’ This is that book.

In How to End a Story, Australian writer Helen Garner said writing about her life ‘is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it’. That sentiment ripples through this quiet, reflective, captivating and deeply empathetic memoir. At one stage, before she loses her capacity to talk, Knox’s mother tells the story of her and her younger sister playing in a field in Invercargill, knowing it was time to go home only when the express train to Dunedin left the station. ‘From the first time she told it,’ writes Knox, ‘Mum wasn’t telling only me the story, she was telling herself. Telling herself herself.’

In Night, Ma, Knox tells herself herself, identifying the history, the context, the slow slippage behind that dramatic rockfall, not with the self-assurance of an omniscient authority but with the curiosity of someone still held in the shuddering impact of these events. We meet the author as a four-year-old, the middle of three girls growing up in a state house in the Hutt Valley. She is watchful, wary, drawn into the erratic orbit of her older sister. ‘Jo told the story of whatever was going on with Elizabeth,’ she writes, slipping into third person. ‘I was understood and spoken for.’

On the stopbanks of the Hutt River, Jo hatches a plan to kidnap a toddler; she drops her sister into the cold, brown ‘muscled flow’ of the river; she follows an older boy into the bushes. Later, at home, she directs her younger sister to masturbate her. ‘She is at home and feels homesick,’ Knox writes of her younger self. ‘She is in her normal, daily company, and vastly alone’.

It is only when the author attends a conference on violence against women with her younger sister Sara, the child victim of a serial paedophile, that she confronts the abuse. ‘You should have your hand up,’ says Sara, when asked who in the room had suffered sexual violence. ‘I don’t think it counts,’ Knox replies. ‘You should have your hand up,’ Sara insists. Knox puts her hand up.

Largely ignored, buried under a blanket of silence, avoidance or desperate rationalisation, Jo’s increasingly paranoid behaviour (Knox avoid labels) will eventually lead to hospitalisation and medication before returning to family life.

She talks to the reader: ‘What I’m trying to have you see is how being rebuffed, baffled, embarrassed, horrified and hurt make the relatives of the person with mental health problems go off to stand behind the barrier of their own overtaxed emotions’.

From here, we follow the slow diagnosis of her mother’s illness – the doctors’ visits, the tests, the misdiagnoses, the research, the practicalities of communication, mobility and feeding, the care for the beloved cat Cheeky. Motor neurone disease, she says, is a horror show: ‘People caring for somebody who has it are just filling sandbags and putting them in place while the water rises’.

Knox sets her mother’s decline against memories of her vivacity – the small, elegant, well-dressed woman running along the platform at Wellington Railway Station to share the train back home with her tertiary student daughter: ‘Those Friday evenings on the train to Paramata were the beginning of a kind of romance – the romance that we have with our parents if we’re lucky enough to still have parents when we first become adults.’

We follow the author, her husband Fergus and son Jack, as they deal with the death of Fergus’ brother Duncan, deliberately mowed down on his first night in Rarotonga as a member of the Golden Oldies team from the Manukau Rovers rugby club. Again she walks us through the events slowly, carefully. The first phone call, the painful contact with Fergus’ father, the tormented grief of Duncan’s wife, the confusion of his four children, the harrowing realisation that his death was deliberate, not by chance ‘but by malice’.

During the prolonged trial in Rarotonga, she swims, she writes notes for her new young adult novel, she checks her mother’s next neurologist appointment. In the private world of the ‘quiet page’ she feels ‘safe. This me, the one who remembers, and sometimes remembers to write things down’.

Alongside these events is the anticipation, the ‘wonderful dream’ of Niki Caro’s film version of The Vintner’s Luck, then the gut-wrenching disappointment around the plot, and the astonishing omission of the love between Xas the angel and Sobran the winemaker. ‘I’m just baffled and confused by what you’ve done with Vintner,’ she wrote in an email to Caro. ‘I feel like the truest thing I can say is that it is a fabulous film – but not of my book.’

Through all these stories, there are digressions, some repetitions, in the telling. There is a writer’s conscience as to whether she should or shouldn’t be writing this: ‘Apology, excuse, or tale-telling. Whichever this is, I don’t know how to write it any temperate way,’ she writes of her account of her sister’s illness. ‘There’s so much shame, and tormenting bafflement, and the testimony is hard to speak and hard to hear.’

Night, Ma is a remarkable and remarkably honest book. As the author of 14 novels, an essay collection and three autobiographical novellas, Knox knows to avoid the pitfalls of tell-all memoirs listing towards sensational self-exposure, shocking revelation or apologia. Night, Ma is not a page turner – the pace is measured, the tears in this book are signs of physical degeneration rather than sentiment. Instead, it takes readers through these events at a walking pace, giving time for Knox to gather her thoughts, to consider cause and effect, to integrate what happened into family history, place, the routines of home and working life, the ferry trips between Wellington and Picton, the gentle details of op-shopping with her mother, buying a tomato plant, playing Scrabble; the endless cups of tea in the rest home, the Zip puffing steam across the kitchen ceiling at her brother-in-law’s funeral, the frogs from her mother’s filled-in pond departing for the wetland near the Catholic Church, the author bending to pat their three basking cats – ‘being again a human being with her feet on the ground and hands on a cat, not a mule in a caravan in a mountain pass, climbing, every step sinking in snow’.