Writing in the Sydney Review of Books in 2020, Sydney novelist Peter Polites reimagines his Greek Australian mother as the mythological figure Medea, a sorceress “who transgressed for love but was never rewarded”. In the same essay, he reveals how his mother never divorced his father (Hercules, “full of rage and letters”) because she feared he would kill their children. Imagining them as figments of myth, where the fates govern destiny, is narratively therapeutic, Polites writes. “It’s better to think of them like this, rather than the facts of it all.”
Fragments of this essay appear in Polites’ third novel, God Forgets About the Poor: a story, on the surface, of a Greek woman named Honoured who migrates to Australia. To anyone, but especially followers of the author’s work, it’s clear the woman is a guise for Polites’ mother, whose various spectres have populated his writing. The novel opens with Honoured’s monologue, hectoring her son about how he can’t keep writing his “gay things” – a nod to Polites’ two prior novels, Down the Hume (2017) and The Pillars (2020) – and should instead write about her. She tells him to “make it magical in the way that artists do”.
