Debra Adelaide’s novel about friendship is a tender, complex requiem
FICTION
When I Am Sixty-Four
Debra Adelaide
UQP, $34.99
From the first page of Debra Adelaide’s mesmerising new novel, it’s clear we’re in profoundly sad territory. It’s autumn and the writer is trying to rouse her friend from a dark depression, “the tiny lozenge of her frame” barely perceptible in a carved cedar bed that was once a place where the author’s baby son had slumbered alongside her friend’s daughter for afternoon naps.
The two women have known each other since schooldays and have grown together as writers, mothers, academics, cooks – including perfecting a mouth-watering Mexican mole, the thick chile and chocolate sauce whose secret ingredients her friend learned when she lived in Mexico.
But now one of them is slipping away, “as if she were at the bottom of the well, any rope dangling out of reach”.
Soon we learn her friend’s father, a charismatic left-wing academic, took his own life at the age of 64 while she was bringing her newborn back to Australia from Mexico to meet the family. That tragedy underpins the novel’s narrative, but Adelaide introduces tantalising glimmers of hope as she darts back and forth, filling in the ebb and flow of the special union between the two women. She paints intimate – not always glowing – sketches of her friend’s character, writing, romantic failures and struggle with mental illness.
The tone is tender, laced with wry humour. Her friend’s bookshelf reveals Edward St Aubyn, Anita Brookner and Truman Capote alongside Feminist Cross-Stitch. Possessive apostrophes become a running gag. “Words were our medium,” writes Adelaide, whose own linguistic prowess dances and glistens.
As she begins to understand the gravity of her friend’s situation, the author suggests that as a mood-booster they might return to their joint opus Agony Author, a lexicon of advice for authors compiled from their pooled knowledge of the publishing industry’s shortcomings gleaned over decades. The book would be necessarily anonymous if either wanted to work again, the alphabetical entries pulling no punches. The “Curse of the Headless Woman” is one hilarious example. “For decades in our publishing careers it appeared that there was a rule prohibiting a woman’s face on a cover, unless it were a romance or fantasy novel,” explains Adelaide.
The form of When I am Sixty-Four is auto-fiction, a short but mighty blend of autobiography and fiction. There are also elements of stream of consciousness as Adelaide comes to some stark realisations about fractures in her relationship with her friend and interweaves her own ongoing battle with the Indian Myna birds taking over her garden.
In the acknowledgments, Adelaide explains what readers familiar with her work will have already suspected, that the novel is based on her real-life friendship with Gabrielle Carey, who co-wrote the seminal – and at the time controversial – Aussie teenage novel Puberty Blues with Kathy Lette when the duo were teenage besties. They famously fell out post-publication.
Adelaide’s descriptions of the boisterous fame-seeking girl who took her friend away from her are withering. She recounts that back then her friend wrote to her outlining their idea for a tale of coercively abusive teen beach culture asking her to share stories from their weekends as “surfie chicks”. It’s one of a clutch of pivotal moments in the book that expose the divisions between the two friends. Adelaide was never in that clique. She neither possessed a black bikini, wasn’t small and blond, nor did she have a Neanderthal surfie boyfriend, she notes.
Inevitably the novel ends with deep sorrow, but somehow it doesn’t overwhelm. Rather, Adelaide has composed a complex unique requiem putting her friend to rest in the only way she knows how – through their shared passion for exquisitely crafted words.
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