Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades

Lynley Edmeades is the current editor of the literary journal Landfall, an academic teaching English and creative writing at Otago University and the author of three poetry collections.  From her writing here, we also see her experience of motherhood.

This volume aroused curiosity from the moment I picked it up. The cover, an art installation by Emily Hartley-Skudder, shows a bathroom that is domestic, functional, essential and everyday but also curious in being both manufactured and individually quirky, private but on display. Opening to quotes referencing that a book can contain "a world not even mentioned", and that it is "a joy to be hidden", we are then told that this is a book about becoming a mother. And then that none of it is real.

With these enigmatic starting points, we open up what seems to be a kind of notebook. Each page is different and ranges from diary entries about pregnancy and the early days of motherhood, to letters and journal records of ideas about the writing process,  and notes and musings on research ideas. These entries are interspersed with pages from Truby King's seminal 1913 work prescribing a disciplined approach to " Feeding and Care of Baby" and with a correspondence with a relative about her grandfather's breakdown and respite at Queen Mary Hospital, Hanmer Springs.

Hiding Places defies definition by genre. Is it fiction, non-fiction, memoir or creative writing?  Librarians will have trouble classifying this one!  The strands of this compilation are interwoven and ever-changing, so I found my mind constantly turning in a new direction. Each page/entry brought a different response: I was by turns empathetic, amused, shocked, curious and sometimes confused and unsure of what to think.  Reading through, I was fueled with anticipation, looking for connections and developments. Looking back on the thread that related most to my own experiences, I found the rawness and the unflinching accounts of the psychological and physical load of being a new mother particularly resonated.  I found myself less engaged with the discussion of autofiction, writing and authors, but I can see that the creative and academic life was also challenging and required constant interrogation, as did the state of motherhood.

As a reader, I bought into the truth of the author's emotions and perspectives, but found the narrator elusive, not sure whether this was the voice of lived experience or a fictionalised persona. Interestingly, the narrator's perspective is sometimes spoken of as "you", or "mother" and even "bad mother", keeping the writer distanced; and the list of characters at the start does not include the writer/narrator, surely the most central of all the characters. The blacked-out text in places and the revolving door of subject matter add to the sense of looking for that which is unseen, of searching for something elusive.

The recurring quotation "there is never nothing beneath something that is covered " like a refrain hearkens to the writer's ongoing exploration through writing for meaning.  So she will continue to uncover as she concludes her letter on the last page, " yours presently".

I was drawn in by the intense, fragmented writing as the author looked for meaning in "hidden places" and found myself returning again and again to re-read, like the writer, to the story, “the place where hovering happens.”

Reviewer: Clare Lyon

Otago University Press