Good girls don't leave

Author's memoir a lively and nuanced exploration of a woman defying the expectations of society. 

- DAVID HILL

LAUGHING AT THE DARK, by Barbara Else (Penguin, $37)

The famous expat Hungarian intellectual and writer Arthur Koestler opined that people wrote memoirs and autobiographies "for two main reasons: the chronicler urge, or the ecce homo [behold the man] motive".

The first focuses on external events; the second -behold the (wo)man! - on internal experiences. So I declare Barbara Else's Laughing at the Dark to be an ecce homo chronicle, stepping agilely and often between the "Great World" and the personal, truly great world. Among other things, it's a nuanced exploration of gender roles, social expectations, the juggling to be good, whole and honest. Else encounters such issues early, with her mother's "quietly refusing to do what you're told"; her own wagging from Sunday School, "fed up with being good"; her primary school realisation of the compromises and complexities of conventional virtue.