Home-maker, writer, rebel: Barbara Else gets honest about her career and marriage

Posted: Sunday Apr 09, 2023

One of New Zealand’s best known authors, Barbara Else rebelled against a lot of things women were once expected to think, say and do without complaint. In this extract from her new memoir, Laughing at the Dark, Else digs into her career - and marriage - with brutal honesty.

The extract below is from Laughing at the Dark by Barbara Else, published by Penguin Random House, out Tuesday.

In the first years in Fernlea Avenue, I ask Jim to read two or three short pieces of writing. After the first, he doesn’t move my work from the corner of his desk where I place it.

I sneak the pieces away again. He is busy. He saves lives, and a short story won’t. I crush the slithering thought that he doesn’t want to say that my writing is useless.

All this time Jim is working on his PhD, running the lab, seeing patients, working on an increasing number of committees. We attend medical functions and dinner parties.

We host dinner parties too. A mattress of depression, distress, presses down as I lay the table with the silver, bring out the Pine Pattern Crown Lynn, prepare the nibbles, the entrée, the main course, the dessert, the platter of cheese.

I write a one-act play, Feeding the Dinosaurs, about this kind of dinner party. Feeding dinosaurs would be terrifying but the job absolutely would have to be done.

In his speech at a School of Medicine function, the Dean praises Jim’s work in his lab and the research coming out of it. A cardiac physician standing beside me mutters, ‘We’re damn thankful Jim came to Wellington. He makes us all look better. Not one of the rest of us is doing the research we’re supposed to.’

My eyes close. My heart sinks. He doesn’t have to be working so hard, then. He is putting himself through even more godawful pressure than he has to because the others have begun to rely on him. At this moment it feels as if my husband’s a dinner for parasites. […]

I keep sewing curtains, wallpapering the living room, dining room, the girls’ rooms, the kitchen, my makeshift plumb bob a bottle opener on a string. It’s enjoyable, the making and doing, solitary play. But oh god, the kitchen. I choose white vinyl paper with blue, red and yellow checks that should be easy to match. Nobody warns me that vinyl stretches. And I’m paperhanging alone, and it’s a solitary ordeal up a ladder with only two arms when I need at least four, but in the end – before anyone comes home – every check mates.

I’m so proficient at home-making and smiling by now that even the Stepford Wives could learn from me. I paint, paper and recurtain Jim’s study, which is a pleasant room off the family room. I paint the back hallway, wallpaper the back loo and fit a new catch on its door. […]

This full year charges on, sometimes frantic, desperate, joyful, often all three in a knot.

I write Changes, a play commissioned by KDS [Karori Dramatic Society] with support from Community Arts. It’s a history of the local community and the place of women through the decades. I know Jim won’t think much of the idea, but he isn’t the intended audience. It’s workshopped with Rebecca Mason as dramaturg, Helene Wong as director. I am learning from these women, and from the workshop audience.

Our sister-in-law Gloria, married to Jim’s younger brother Rob, takes a course in Assertiveness Training. Jim says nothing to them, but to me he is scathing about it, contemptuous. I envy Gloria. I wouldn’t mind assertiveness training myself though I don’t dare say so.

I begin a third play, Crazy Paving, about a man with renal failure and a chaotic family who must decide what medical option he will agree to. Really it’s about how a man gradually learns to submit his ego to necessity. I already have plenty of medical information and data, but the play is to be about the human side, and I want to do it with humour. I ask Jim to advise on some reading to give me a feel for the patient’s experience. He suggests nursing magazines. I scavenge through them in the Medical Library.

When this play too is at third-draft stage, I ask Jim if he’d mind reading it to find factual mistakes.

When he’s finished, he looks confused. ‘How do you know so much?’

I’m confused too. ‘You told me to look at nursing magazines.’

‘No, no. I mean so much about people. How do you know so much when all you do is stay at home?’

I’m shocked. It’s a tiny comment – it’s a huge comment.

‘Anyway, you can’t have this.’ He flips the pages to a conversation between the main character and a medical technician. There’s a line of dialogue where the father says he doesn’t want his daughter to hear a word about the possibility of her donating a kidney. Jim points to it. ‘Take that out.’

‘But that’s what–’

‘Take it out,’ repeats Jim. ‘He can’t say that. We need to encourage people to donate kidneys.’

My jaw juts. I am not writing an advertisement, I’m exploring character. I begin my sentence again and charge on to the end. ‘That is what this individual character would say. The father doesn’t want his daughter at any risk. I am the writer. It is my play.’

Laughing at the Dark by Barbara Else, published by Penguin Random House, is out on Tuesday (11 Apr), RRP $40.

See original article and images HERE