Fiona Kidman, beside the Dark Pool
Fiona Kidman's two volumes of memoirs have had a powerful effect on me. I wrote a more detailed response recently but it is too personal for a public blog. Particularly powerful lines for me in besid e the Dark Pool : "The 1970s had seen seismic shifts in the way women lived. Many of us couldn't recognise ourselves in our mothers' lives at all." p.57 This has prompted much reflection for me. When I was a teenager and a young adult, I assumed the world of paid work would be my place. I was off to conquer the world, to experience the things my mother and aunts told me were not mine to experience. It was much later that it came to feel an act of rebellion not to work outside the home full time and sometimes not at all after I had my children. And this line, in which Kidman writes of the process of returning home with her mother before her mother went into the Home of Compassion, We went through boxes of photographs, mementoes of her past life, recipe books, and