Sharp as a knife

Memoir of a girl growing up across two hemispheres is a sly and delicious peepshow.

- KIRSTY GUNN

Catherine Taylor's book is less a memoir than it is a literary study of a kind of splitting. Throughout her account of a life growing up as a girl - in New Zealand and the UK - at a time when to be one seemed particularly fraught with heterosexually charged dangers and lusts, she slices into her narrative and changes it, shifts it from being one sort of story into another. "To start at the beginning, or at a beginning. The hourglass of our family had a few grains of sand left in it... The white sands of Mull... the black volcanic sands of New Zealand... Nothing could be known."

Born in Waikato in the late 60s, Taylor can't help but place the effect of that history in the very heart of her narrative and its result is to feel that one is not so much reading an autobiography as experiencing a constant flicker of light and dark, of here and there, of secrets and secrets shown. It's as though the country Taylor came from keeps turning off and on its light, casting bright shadows everywhere she looks, causing a single scene to be cut right down through its middle to show both of its hemispheres. "The hot sun, the Pacific light... the air now chilly and smoky... We had travelled all the way across the world."

The Stirrings opens with a line from the German poet Christa Wolf: "The paths we really took are overlaid with paths we did not take ...", and so from the beginning we feel this writer to be fixing upon her text a perspective that looks back to her childhood and adolescence using the forward propulsion of her future as a journalist and writer.