CHILDLESS

Their eyes stare straight out at you from five grainy black-and-white photos on the wall. Such young faces, framed by luxuriant waves of hair in various stages of bouffant rebellion. The hair is unmistakably from the seventies, but those eyes could be staring at you from any decade. The men’s facial expressions seem to cover the spectrum of human emotions. Malcolm Rennie is grinning, Brian Peters has a half-smile, and there’s a faint wry twist to Gary Cunningham’s lips. But Greg Shackleton is furrow-browed and there is something haunted in Tony Stewart’s serious, wide-eyed gaze.

 To the girl standing right in front of me at the Byron Bay Blues Festival recently: Because you have only lived in that creamy clear skin for two decades I don’t expect you to know that it was not polite of you and your friend to push your way through the crowd of people who had been standing on their tired mud-caked feet for over an hour in order to be close to the front when Paul Simon sauntered on stage.

Stepsisters often get a bad rap. Think of poor Cinderella, dealing with not one but two of them, both ugly, selfish and vain. Think of poor Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), whose stepsister Claire Clairmont was rumoured to have had an affair with Shelley’s famous husband, Percy the poet. Just a couple of months ago US gossip magazine Newsweek featured a breathless tale of a poor woman whose dream wedding venue was ‘stolen’ by her wicked stepsister. But I’m here to tell a different tale about these much-maligned siblings.

How do you use language to illuminate the darkest moments in a life? How do you recount the desolation of grief without further wounding yourself - or your readers? Can writing tether you to a place of safety when you are engulfed by vulnerability? These are questions Justy Phillips and Sian Prior were forced to contemplate whilst writing their recently-published memoirs.