Chloe Hooper sets up her memoir in quick strokes: two young sons, an older partner and something, suddenly, happening, rendering domestic life precious and strange. The father of her children is Don Watson (writer, historian and, famously, Keating speechwriter). The something: a common cancer and a rare mutation. Hooper, two novels and two critically acclaimed works of investigative nonfiction under her belt, turns her humane, forensic eye on her own family’s grief and private undoing. It feels like a novel, its characters engrossing, moving and funny – that these are real people seems a secondary, extraordinary feat.
Bedtime Story is dedicated to both boys but addressed mainly to the elder. Hooper pores through centuries of children’s books, hunting for stories that will help her speak to him “about the real dark”. She is not just looking for language to broach the subject of Watson’s illness, but to teach herself, somehow, to be less afraid.
