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Book review: When it Rains

Book review: When it Rains by Maggie Mackellar

Reviewed by Lorraine Cormack

 

“When it Rains” is non-fiction, Maggie Mackellar’s story of how her life fell apart and how she started to put it back together again.  When Maggie is six months pregnant with her second child, and her eldest is five years old, her mentally ill husband commits suicide.  Staggering under the pressure of her grief and the need to keep going for her children, Maggie is barely able to cope when two years later her much loved mother is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that kills her within weeks.

Maggie runs away, a characterisation she would probably agree with, although she might also point out that she was running to something as well – a sense of family history, of community, and of continuity.  She struggles on for a while but then packs up her two children, takes a leave of absence from work, and moves to the farm in central west NSW where her mother grew up. Ultimately, she gives up her job and stays in the country.

I had expected this memoir to be a difficult one to read. It wasn’t. In fact, it had very little emotional impact on me.  There is a remoteness to the way Mackellar writes of her pain that placed a wall between me and the emotions.  This may in part be because Mackellar is writing it as a retrospective; time may have distanced her a little from some of the rawness.  Or it may be an intentional reflection of the numbness and shock that she experienced.  In any case, it kept me from feeling completely engaged with this story.

There is much in the memoir that will strike a chord with readers.  The reflection, for example, that some deaths are more acceptable than others – people know how to react and sympathise to some kinds of deaths, whereas others are almost taboo. It is not unnatural for Mackellar to lose her mother to cancer, but losing a young husband to suicide is something others don’t know how to approach.  The constant struggle of juggling her commitments – work, children, family, the basics such as cooking meals – will resonate with many. The relentless needs of children that both force you to go on and make you want to run away.  In fact, I think most readers will find at least one observation or incident that feels immediately familiar to them from their own lives.

However, I have a basic problem with this sort of memoir, in which someone throws up much or all of their life and runs away to find themselves, reinvent their lives, or resolve a problem. For most people, that isn’t an option, especially with small children to provide for. They’re tied to a job (or at least the wage), to a location, to support networks.  It’s just not viable to seriously run away. And not only does Maggie run away to the country to get her head straight; when she has to decide whether to return to the city permanently or not, on a whim she takes her two children on a seven week holiday to Europe.  Financially, that’s the sort of whim that’s beyond the reach of a lot of people.  I’m not sure whether this memoir would be of much help to someone looking for ways to handle their own grief over a major loss or losses.

Another difficulty for me was that Mackellar’s husband never emerged as a person, so it was hard to fully feel her loss.  We see him primarily either on a trip to Alaska in the early, still childless years of their marriage, or dead. We don’t get a strong sense of the loving and happy part of their marriage, what he was like as a father, or a strong sense of his collapse into mental illness.  This was probably a conscious decision on Mackellar’s part, as this memoir is a reflection on grief and on moving forward rather than an attempt to provide significant biographical detail. However, the lack of a picture of her husband meant I felt I was missing something vital to understanding her grief.

“When It Rains” is an interesting memoir, with a strong Australian flavour, about someone confronting an emotion most people will have to deal with sooner or later. Truthfully, I didn’t find it particularly uplifting or encouraging. It is realistic that when Mackellar closes her memoir, years later, she is still experiencing grief and still not quite sure how to handle it. However, I didn’t have a sense of either progress or closure.  Mackellar appears to feel that she has achieved something by changing her life so completely; I am not convinced that running away really addressed the underlying problem of her grief.

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