Tag: broken leg

I haven’t read the book, but in my opinion, it’s not worth reading.

It’s within a week of a year since I broke my leg. At the time recovering from this break seemed interminable. Eight weeks of my life weighed down with a cast from ankle to knee and now I can scarcely even remember that it happened. I no longer even notice the twinges that beset me earlier this year when I was still recovering.

My broken leg has healed and now all I have is the memory and the cast which I could not bring myself to chuck out. For one thing it cost over $900.00 – would you believe? – and for another, it seems sacrilegious to chuck it out. But it’s of no use and when I dragged it out the other day to show my brother-in-law who lives interstate and missed out on the drama of my broken leg, I realised that it could not serve as the basis of any work of art – an earlier fantasy of mine.

The cast was custom made to fit my leg. It has no place in my life anymore, not unless I were to break my leg again in the same place, and that is unlikely. In the next clean up, which I plan to go through over the Christmas holidays I may bite the bullet and consign it to the tip.

I have a chapter in my thesis in which I discuss the furore that erupted over Ann Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty. The book is her memorial, you might say, to her friend Lucy Grealy, author of the renowned Autobiography of a Face. Grealy died in her early forties of a suspected heroin overdose.

To me both books are beautifully written and well worth reading, but the reason I focus on them in my thesis has more to do with the audience response to these books, particularly as I see them played out within the blogosphere.

There is a post dedicated to discussions of a letter that Suellen Grealy, Lucy’s older sister, wrote to The Guardian about Patchett’s book.

Suellen believes that Ann Patchett has ‘hijacked’ her family’s grief by writing about her younger sister and to some extent about the Grealy family as she has. Mind you, there is not much about Lucy Grealy’s family in Patchett’s book as far as I can see. The book is more about Lucy herself and her relationship with Ann Patchett.

The thing that intrigues me is the degree to which this book has inspired a line of hate mail directed against Patchett for daring to violate the Grealy family’s right to its private grief, or at least for daring to present a different image of Lucy Grealy to the one she presented in her autobiography.

I’m interested in notions of grief, particularly in so far as they relate to issues of privacy and the public sphere. I understand Ann Patchett’s book to be in part her attempt to come to terms with the loss of her beloved friend and a commemoration of their friendship, but also as an expression of, or a space in which to explore, some of Patchett’s anger with her friend for perhaps not making a better fist of things.

Having said that, I don’t sense that Ann Patchett lacks in empathy for her friend, Lucy, whose life sounds as though it was horrendous. There’s something though in the way we live our lives, the uses to which we put our lives, especially when those lives are described in public as in the writing of these two books that then invite others to come along and judge those lives, for good or for ill.

To me there’s a confusion between the content of the writing, the writing itself and the real lives of the people, either those who write or those written about.

In one of the comments on this blog discussing Suellen’s letter of protest, Jack Grealy, a nephew, writes a comment in which he complains about what he considers to be one blog commenter’s attack on his aunt, Suellen. ‘She’s my aunt,’ he seems to say. ‘You can’t talk about her like that.’

But in the public sphere, in the blog world, Suellen Grealy is not simply Jack Grealy’s aunt, she has become a commodity of sorts, a character in a novel.

She has written about her perceptions in her letter to The Guardian and has thereby thrown herself into the mix, her sister Lucy’s book about her own life, and Ann Patchett’s response to that life and in so doing, she has become a source of interest and curiosity for readers throughout the blogosphere. Therefore another commenter, tells Jack Grealy that he’s out of line.

Although Patchett’s book came out in 2004, and Grealy’s ten years earlier, comments still arrive at the blogsite that posted Suellen’s letter from The Guardian.

Lucy is dead, Ann Patchett has gone on to write several more successful novels, and heaven knows what Suellen is up to these days, but the saga continues.

I find extraordinary the extent to which people feel free to comment on this fracas, including those who admit to not having read either book.

They wade in on the fight as if a mob is gathering on the street and people are baying for someone’s blood – any one’s blood it seems, though not Lucy Grealy’s. She’s seen as the true victim, but her friend, Ann Patchett, is fair game for daring to write about Lucy as she has done, or likewise Lucy’s sister, Suellen, for daring to take Patchett to task.

I suppose literary skirmishes are not uncommon. They bring out the worst and the best in us. It is for this reason, too, I think there is some merit to the notion that even the best of writing can disturb and evoke a hostile reader response.

What is it that happens to us when we read? Is there some sense that when we take in the words off the page they become our own and therefore we have the right to judge, not only the standard of the writing, but also the content. It is as if we become both judge and jury, not only of the writer but also of those who are written about.

It is a powerful phenomenon and it’s one reason why I remind myself constantly that writing is a dangerous business. There is a world of potential critics out there ready to berate you for writing things they may not have read, or they may not want to read, or see, or hear, or remember, or for writing in such a way as to stir up emotions in readers for which they have no other outlet than rage directed at the writer, who is only the messenger after all.

Somehow unlike the cast from my broken leg, certain published writings can never be consigned to the tip. They go on being worn, even after the leg has healed.

Breasts, Brains and Cold Sores

Today is the sixth week since I broke my leg. It is fast becoming my leg again. I can bend it effortlessly though not as far back as I once could. I am not sure I could sit on it yet. I can bend well within a ninety degree angle, though not much further. I have enough movement in my knee to be able to drive my car again. An automatic. My healthy right leg does all the work.

It is still an ordeal of sorts to get into and out of the car but I can now do it unaided. I hobble to the front door, release one crutch and lean it there beside the car, I open the driver’s door, and then toss in my crutches over onto the passenger side. Finally I slide myself into the driver’s seat all the time careful not to twist my bung leg too much at an angle so as to disrupt the bone. Once behind the wheel, I am mobile again, an independent woman in her car.

I have almost stopped worrying that the bone might move. I think it is held in for good now, but still I must take care not to bear weight on my left leg yet, much less to fall or I might not so much displace the bone as fracture it all over again.

Someone told me – in the blogosphere as I recall – that you cannot break a bone in the exact same spot again, that the scar material of bones becomes fixed like the most rigid of concrete, while somewhere else I read that once broken, a bone is more vulnerable, that the fracture points of bones are far more brittle.

I do not know the truth of this. I do not understand the science. I rather enjoyed the idea that once broken, never broken again, like once bitten twice shy, once hurt, never open again, but this is not so perhaps. Points of vulnerability become even more vulnerable.

We have returned for a dose of bitter winter weather again this weekend, with much of the State of Victoria on flood alert. This after over ten years of drought. The dams have moved from being slightly over quarter full a little over a year ago to almost half full today.

Half filled dams are a bonus. I do not remember in my lifetime a moment when the dams were almost full. Half full is about as much as we dare hope for. But then again I rely on memory and my limited knowledge here.

I have only started to attend to the state of the dams in recent years. When I was young and felt more omnipotent than I do now I did not bother with concerns over the state of the land, though I can always remember a terrible fear during the bushfire season even as we did not live close to the bush.

Bush fires are a feature of every Australian’s consciousness. They begin early summer and erupt unpredictably one after another till the end of the hot weather. They are one of the reasons I could not bear to live in bushland.

To worry all summer long about the weather and those hot fire ban days, which arrive with increasing regularity in this country, would throw me out.

There are so many things over which I have no control, weather being one of them, I could not bear to be daily anxious about what the weather might bring during bushfire season.

When I was young, my other uncontrolled worry was the arrival of cold sores on my face. When I was young I might have copped a cold sore almost monthly. Someone explained to me early in the piece that once you have suffered with cold sores you have them for life.

Cold sores are caused by a virus which lives in your lip. Usually it sleeps there and gives you no trouble, but the minute something goes wrong for you, it flares up like a bushfire.

The cold sore virus is linked to my emotions, like the handle of a tap. Become upset by something and the handle turns. It can even be an upset of which my mind might not be aware, though not my body. My body knows more than my conscious mind, but my unconscious mind drives the other parts of my mind and body or so I believed as a ten year old trying to fight off the inevitable but uncertain arrival of cold sores.

They start as a tingle in your lip and turn into a watery blister that swells to what feels from the inside when you scrape it with your tongue to be the size of a cricket ball. In the mirror this blister stage looks nowhere as bad as the next stage after the blister bursts, usually a large blister or a series of little blisters clustered together.

When I was a chid there was an ointment my mother sometimes bought from the chemist called Stoxil. I was not the only one in my family who copped cold sores. The sooner you applied the Stoxil the more likely you were to beat the virus, or so the writing on the side of the Stoxil tube said. I never had the ointment on hand to test this theory out. My mother, if she bought it, bought it after the event.

Once a cold sore took hold on my lip it was there for up to ten days or more. After the blister burst it became a wide spreading and throbbing red welt that over stretched the edge of my lips and to my mind made me look even more ugly than I imagined myself to be when I was a child, uglier even than the ugliest child in my classroom.

In my family the theory followed that the oldest were the ugliest, growing more beautiful down the line. The youngest girl and boy were the most beautiful. To compensate for this, the reverse applied to brains.

The oldest were the smartest and the youngest were the dumbest. This put me, sixth in line, in the invidious position of having neither brains nor beauty, right here near the middle. I figured in my position, one below the middle, my cleverness won over my appearance if only by a muddling amount.

I was not smart at school, as Mother Mary John in grade six testified after I failed mental arithmetic.
‘I thought you were bad,’ she said, when she handed back my exercise book covered in crosses, ‘but not that bad.’

Mental arithmetic troubled me by its name, mental. Mental with its links to mind, and numbers and to cold sores.

There was a direct line from somewhere in my brain to the place in my lip where the cold sore virus lived. When I was thirteen, I worried about the line for weeks before I became bridesmaid at my second oldest brother’s wedding. I was in between dress sizes and the dressmaker my sister-in-law-to-be had appointed complained to her that people like me were the worst to make dresses for. We were neither child nor woman.

If I had copped a cold sore on my brother’s wedding day, then not only would I be this hybrid creature who needed a bra that had so much padding inside the cups that my brothers laughed the first time they saw me lined up on the steps of the church before the wedding, I would also be ugly.

I recognised my brothers’ sneers. They knew my body was fake. I knew my body was fake, but the dressmaker had insisted there would be no point in making a dress that fitted my exact size at the time. Within weeks my breasts might erupt just like a cold sore and, given that she had started to make the dress at least three months before the event, she needed to be sure she could accommodate all eruptions.

Breasts, brains and cold sores, they go together for me in an uneasy sequence. I could not control them. I could not control how much my brain might hold in of the times table I rote learned on weekends in readiness for Monday morning tests when we lined up in the class room and took turns to recite the tables one after the other.

My surname began with the letter ‘S’. I was always to the end of the line and the end of the line was where the hardest sums landed – the seven times eight type questions, which so often evaded me; the nine times six.

Even now I can feel a prickle in my lip as I remember how the impossible sum tripped the point in my brain that pulled the cord that sent the signal down to the virus in my lip and told it to wake up and get back to work.

To fail mental arithmetic not only showed up on my school report at the end of term, it showed up on my face and everyone could see, how dumb and ugly I was, even when my sister-in-law-to-be had dressed me up in a canary yellow silk ball gown that fell all the way to my feet and was topped off by two enormous bosoms that were not my own.

Eruptions came all to easily in those days. Perhaps it accounts today for why I make such terrible mistakes and can never quite manage to conceal them.