Robyn Davidson’s new book starts with a punch to the stomach that leaves you winded. The celebrated Australian traveller and writer takes us back to her 11-year-old self. Her mother, Gwen, doesn’t want her to wear gold sandals to school. Young Robyn has never disobeyed her before, but this time she does. As she leaves the kitchen, her mother says: “Aren’t you even going to kiss me goodbye?” Robyn heads off for school, triumphant in her gold sandals. When she returns later that day, her mother has killed herself.
What she tells me when we talk on a video call is equally shocking in its own way. “From the day she died, I didn’t think about her once. She was never mentioned in the family.” Her book, Unfinished Woman, presents itself as an investigation into her mother’s life and death – a biography of sorts. But, really, it is an autobiography, from a narrator who stresses her unreliability and unwillingness to even write it. She says that memory is selective, revisionist, mendacious even, or simply fades to nought. Take the story of the sandals. When we talk, Davidson admits that she is pretty sure Gwen’s death didn’t directly follow her act of rebellion. She probably died weeks, even months, later, but in her head the two events are umbilically linked.
