But what came later should not eclipse what came before. Brennan is superb at showing Mears in her folly and glory:needy,demanding,sometimes manipulative and ruthless,but also charismatic,seductive to both men and women,physically brave,a generous friend,a playful aunt,a passionate advocate for the natural world and its creatures (especially horses),equipped with a genius for living unbridled.
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For the ladies among us still faking orgasms,witness the un-ladylike Mears phoning her former husband to ask for his pleasuring techniques so she could pass his advice to a new lover she found sexually wanting. If that particular story doesn’t tell us something about Mears,perhaps the fact that her ex was willing to provide two pages of typed instructions,while her new lover was affronted but mainly impressed by her boldness,tells us more about her mesmerising attractions.
Or witness Mears taking off alone in a decommissioned ambulance for the wilds of the bush,or see her in physical extremis,her body half paralysed,crawling up a mountain in Venezuela in search of a miracle.
The remarkable writer and person that Gillian Mears became owes everything to her beginnings,and Brennan navigates her animating origin story with confidence. If Mears’ work has a certain gothic quality,it’s because her family and early life contained psychic dramas of Shakespearean proportions.
Her father was a grass scientist and her talented but unfulfilled mother a charismatic figure. Somehow the family – mother,father,Mears and her three sisters – became emotionally enmeshed,so that invariably one sister felt betrayed by another,or one sister wasn’t talking to another until hell froze over. When Mears was 15 her best friend was shot and killed by her own mother.
Plenty of material,eh? Except that the material was also her adored elder sister Yvonne’s material,a writer too (bad luck for her),and when Mears pinched part of Yvonne’s title (Grass Angels) for her own second novel (The Grass Sister),Yvonne was outraged.
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There is plenty more on the ethics of writers creating books from lived experience,and unquestionably some of Mears’ friends,lovers and relatives felt aggrieved. Mears was a compulsive letter-writer and diarist – Brennan draws extensively from her enormous archive – and some felt betrayed after learning she had sold their letters to the State Library of New South Wales.
Brennan’s stories occasionally leave out other stories nestled inside. I was not an intimate friend of Mears,nor was I interviewed for this book,but I was invited to her last great party when she danced in her wheelchair,and which Brennan describes as an “unsettled” evening,partly because of concern over news of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine.
What Brennan leaves out is why Mears and other members of Australia’s literary community present that night were unsettled:word was filtering in that one of our number,Melbourne novelist Liam Davison,was on board.
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What else has been left out? And doesn’t this illustrate the ambiguous nature of biography’s stories?
Brennan writes that one of her motivations in writing the book is her belief that Mears’ work deserves to be more widely celebrated and remembered. Her biography shows a remarkable duty of care towards Mears the woman and the writer,and should immediately plunge new readers into Mears’ unknowable sea.
Susan Johnson’s latest novel isFrom Where I Fell is published by Allen&Unwin.