Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

Nora has always made things, mostly embroideries and clothes. Except, as it turns out, for two magnificent, intractable complications: sex and art, the very complications that Tirra Lirra is about. I could get sick, educated, divorced, raise my children alone and have all my future novels (in which I could out myself without recrimination as whatever I liked) funded on the public purse. I was a beneficiary of this new, just, well-funded world. We'd had another wave of feminism in the Western world and the extraordinary Whitlam Labor government's social reforms. Why did this novel mean so much? After all, it was about the struggles of a woman 70 years earlier to live a life in which she can create works of art. Did it feed a monster? Did it comfort or encourage something that should have been put in a sack and sunk? What did they think would happen to us, back in a suburban girls' school in the lost, pre-grunge, hair-gelled 1980s? Still, a small part of me - perhaps the part now a mother to pre-teen girls - does wonder if this stunning, toxic cocktail of books that formed me was not too strong. Anderson's daughter, the eminent screenwriter Laura Jones ( Oscar and Lucinda, The Portrait of a Lady, An Angel at My Table) told me her mother's belief was that truly terrible subjects become bearable to us in art, because the art itself - the beauty of form - offers a kind of consolation. They are a trifecta of high art, terror and truth that are almost too powerful to give to teenagers, which is to say exactly what they crave and need (as opposed to 'relevant' books about 'issues' which are 'resolved' in candy-floss epiphanies and 'growth and change moments').Īll three books are about extraordinary teenage misfits: the genius Louie and the 'freak' Frankie - who inhabit the writers Stead and McCullers - and Jessica Anderson's Nora, wry and brave. In the mid-1980s, Tirra Lirra was a set text for secondary school students in Melbourne, Australia, along with Christina Stead's masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children and Carson McCullers' sublime The Member of the Wedding. Illustration by Ana Bustelo/The Illustration Room.

Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson