Writer Robyn Davidson explores her past, her family, time and memory in insightful and compelling fashion
By Elizabeth Wainwright
In 1977, at the age of 27, Robyn Davidson crossed 2,700 kilometres of remote Australian desert accompanied by four camels and her dog. She captured the experience in her book Tracks and it marked the beginning of a life of travel, adventure and writing about it all.
Now, in Unfinished Woman, Davidson puts her skilled writing and perceptive eye to work on her past, her family, time and memory – territory she has rarely explored. Central to these reflections is her mother’s suicide at age 46, when Davidson was 11. The book is a cracking open of the layers of memory since then, to better understand her mother, herself and the world in which she has made her home.
At 18, Davidson left rural Queensland for Sydney, where she slept in parks and fed herself by rummaging through bins. From there, she travelled far and wide through Australia, London, India, Tibet and the USA, moving from house to house, trying to understand her ‘own strangeness in the midst of strangers’. She touches on her relationship with Salman Rushdie, on her bond with Doris Lessing, on music, on writing. She struggled for years to write the book and to find coherence in scattered memories. The struggle paid off and the result is insightful, compelling, at times moving. Her skill as a travel writer makes memories and places come alive.
Despite its exploration of a sometimes painful and uncertain past, there’s a guardedness in her writing. Davidson’s telling is revealing but removed. She acknowledges this: ‘I don’t feel any emotion when I think of my mother’s death… when I touch the area around that day, I can feel only callus.’
But Davidson says that ‘an author’s job is never to judge her characters, but to understand them…’ Perhaps it’s the reader’s job too.
Unfinished Woman is a set of memories, but at times it becomes something more universal: a meditation on what it is to be alive. ‘Sometimes… everything stands still… as it did in the desert, when the isolated self dissolved into the web of everything… And I arrive in the only home I could ever have – the ineffable, unfathomable present.’
