And Southall, like Stow, is a writer who has almost disappeared from literary history. I remember, like Gabrielle, devouring Southall’s books as a child. And it’s a searching meditation on the intense relationships that can form between intensely private people.įalling out of Love with Ivan Southall (2018), as the title suggests, is a similar combination of literary biography and memoir. It’s also a study of an enigmatic writer who was once internationally acclaimed, but who has now almost disappeared from Australian literary history. Moving among Strangers tells the story of a daughter’s search to find out more about her mother and the younger self her daughter never saw or knew. When she pressed him for more, he fell silent, and within a year, he had died. In Moving among Strangers, she tells how she had written to Stow during her mother’s last days, and that he, a deeply private man, had not only responded warmly with reminiscences of familiar family stories, but had hinted at a side of her mother’s early life and personality that Gabrielle had never known existed. And she was the leading light of not one, but two Finnegans Wake reading groups. She was a performer, along with a number of other Wakean women, in the “Prankqueans”, a musical troupe named after one of the Wake’s characters and dedicated to performing the opera and popular song that is so richly studded throughout Joyce’s writing. She was in regular correspondence with the leading scholars she was the author of numerous acclaimed essays on Joyce. Gabrielle was an internationally respected expert on the Wake. Or if you have some gossip, you can say “I’ve got a seeklet to sell.” Or if you just want to exclaim, you can invert a cliche: “O for a fresh of breath air!” Or if someone asks why you’re doing something, you can respond, “Just for the halibut.” If you’re finding it hard to make a decision, you can say you’re in “twinsome twominds” and your fellow Wakeans will understand. Once you get the hang of it, Wakean words become a kind of code to share.

Riot jamie shaw