‘Destroy! Be courageous!’ – 2 shimmering meditations on grief, nihilism and motherhood

In 1983, Erin Vincent was 14 years old. Like most adolescents, she was beginning to shed her childhood and starting to grow into a more durable, flexible adult skin. But when her parents were killed by a speeding tow truck in western Sydney, she found herself frozen in time, immobilised by shock and disbelief. In 2020, Gemma Parker was feeling restricted with young children in Adelaide when the world entered lockdown with the pandemic. Her plans to research nihilism and literature in Paris, where she studied in her twenties, were crushed. Instead of travelling, she decided to immerse herself in Nietzsche at home, amid the chaos of family life instead. Review: Fourteen Ways of Looking – Erin Vincent (Upswell); The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why: Finding Freedom in the Cage – Gemma Parker (Scribner) New fragmented memoirs by these two Australian writers play with non-linearity to express the turmoil of the soul. One is battered by grief, the other assailed by maternal ambivalence. Although their experiences are very different, conventional modes of storytelling are out of reach for both of them. But each make powerful use of their narratives to convey the distress of an interrupted life.

Losing faith at 14 Erin Vincent’s remarkable new book, Fourteen Ways of Looking, is not an easy read, though as a poetic journey into the deepest recesses of grief, it offers a richly rewarding experience. A deep dive into the psyche of a woman who was transformed as a girl by the sudden death of her parents, this small, but impactful memoir reflects the shattering of a life. It captures Vincent’s desperate search to make sense of a tragedy that has shaped her for the last 43 years. The accident killed her mother instantly, while her father survived for a month before succumbing to his injuries. In the aftermath, Vincent, together with her three year-old brother and 17-year-old sister, was inexplicably deserted by extended family and friends and left to fend for herself. Emotionally bereft, struggling to comprehend her new reality, she resolved to forge ahead, no matter what. “At fourteen, I decided I would be hard as a stone and burn bright as the sun,” she writes. “I decided the show must go on.”

She wore a hot pink dress to her mother’s funeral, did a deal with God, and returned to school a week later. Nevertheless, for all her defiance and determination, she was still a child. Confused, frightened and vulnerable, she wanted to be held, but “could not bear to be touched”. She stopped eating, hid her tears, became convinced her little brother would die next, and decided never to have children of her own. “At fourteen,” she writes, “hope was the first thing to go.” To lose faith at such a tender age is both understandable and unimaginable. When I was 14, my parents were both alive, but one was estranged and the other emotionally abusive. I had to fight to keep my spirit intact. The only things that saved me were music and books. So I am not surprised that the death of Vincent’s parents was a stranding she has never quite recovered from. If you’re broken at 14, it’s extremely hard to heal. ‘When does grief end?’ In many ways, Vincent’s memoir is a true act of courage. Her first book, Grief Girl, was billed as a tale of hope, humour and triumph. But while it offered bereavement guidance for a young adult readership, writing it brought her close to suicide. By contrast, the new narrative, begun during a masters in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney, expresses rather than uses her sorrow. It employs the fragmented form to mirror her fractured identity and ongoing anguish, instead of placing it in the service of others. She reveals her teenage self in a moving portrait unveiled through staggered glimpses, as if this is all she can bear. Simultaneously, she weaves a collective layer throughout, with a series of beautifully amassed associations with the number 14. This impressive amplification of a simple number brings an almost sacred significance to what was a tragically pivotal age for the author. It is a remarkable feat of literary curation.

Drawing from art, music, writing and beyond, Vincent frames her associations as signs from the wider world. Carefully chosen and artfully arranged in loose patterns according to theme, they appear like messages from another realm, offering her a way of finding some kind of meaning in her loss. But sadly, while she positions her personal suffering within the context of the wider human condition, the prevailing emotional tone of the book is isolation. Vincent’s pain, persistently acute, keeps her beyond comfort – and her heartbreak weighs heavily on the page.
“This October, it will be forty years since the accident. When does grief end?” she asks, as she realises she has been living in “my own kind of death zone, trying to catch my breath, for most of my life”. The memoir concludes with Vincent’s attempt to locate her mother by listening to what she has always assumed was a recorded Tarot card reading. But on hearing it, she realises it was a numerology session with a dominant facilitator. Her mother barely speaks, and the prediction is painfully inaccurate. The only tangible clue to her parent lies with an old lottery ticket on which her mother has scrawled the word “alone”. Pondering this discovery as both message and mystery, Vincent is left not with closure, but the ongoing puzzle of human life. A meditation on unresolved grief and the complexities of loneliness, this memoir is also an exploration of the richness of connectivity, the power of symbols and the need to belong. Ending with a quote from page 14 (of course) of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, it concludes on a beautifully open note, resounding with existential questions that can never be answered. Nietzsche and motherhood Gemma Parker’s lively interrogation of Nietzsche’s nihilism, The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why: Finding Freedom in the Cage, also brims with uncertainty. It addresses the mixed feelings of motherhood by reframing a notoriously hedonistic philosophy as pragmatic and constructive. Parker – a poet, essayist and university tutor from South Australia – is a writer with a penchant for intercontinental relocation. Her story begins when her plans to escape domesticity with a research trip to Paris are dashed by the outbreak of COVID. Instead of roaming long leafy boulevards, she is confined to her small Adelaide home, with her books and two young children.

Wiping down the kitchen table to work, she steals the minutes, working in between the many demands of parenting. She tells people she is writing in fragments, though the more “intimate and low-brow femaleness” of “snatches” feels more apt. “A fragment implies a relationship with a whole,” she writers, “whereas a snatch is stolen – swift. It’s whatever can be managed.” During these bite-sized chunks of time, she tries to fend off her longing to be elsewhere by burrowing into Nietzsche’s “intoxicating, liberating, horrifying” concept of the meaningless existence.
Gendered limitations and immaturity Soon she starts to rebel against the gendered limitations and immaturity of the philosopher’s position. She denounces his demands for people to free up their spirits, knowing this doesn’t apply to mothers caught up in pandemics. And she is duly enraged by his “either books or babies” binary, just as Cyril Connolly’s infamous declaration that “that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway” has infuriated women writers for decades.

Desolate, she gives up reading and turns to audio books, losing herself in the despair and absurdity of Samuel Beckett, “a man who does not want to write … but who is driven relentlessly to create”. She finds even more inspiration from Dolly Parton’s autobiography, which tells how the singer, confined to her hotel room on a foul liquid diet, responded to her misery by composing two of her greatest hits. For Parker, Beckett’s perseverance and Parton’s courage are what really constitutes nihilism: both are forms of resistance to hopelessness. Their solutions represent a creative defiance and resourcefulness in the face of futility. However, it’s not until her rental house is about to be demolished that she starts to make sense of nihilism in terms of her lived experience. With her personal mire of domesticity under threat, Parker’s reluctant efforts to stay in one place and accept the limitations of security are thrown up in the air. Being subject to destruction, she discovers, is not the same thing as being creatively destructive. In a bid to cope, she starts to wonder whether it matters how a nihilistic situation comes about, or whether it’s what you do “after the rupture” that counts. The family move house, and Parker’s project continues unabated. She discovers she has Japanese cherry trees in her new garden, culls her book collection, reconnects with an old friend from Paris, reads Camus, learns to speak the language of her French husband, and nostalgically recalls a blissful summer on the Japanese island of Shiraishi, all in pursuit of finding the key to nihilism. “Destroy! Be courageous! Do not submit! Embrace pain! Create!” she writes of Nietzsche’s exasperating demands. “I’m not sure I’ve got a handle on it yet. I’m not sure I ever will.” Shimmering books Reading Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom helps Parker realise she’s looking for a freedom that can only be found “through renunciation, undoneness, abandonment”. This kind of freedom, according to Nelson, is attained by means of subtraction, “by which one touches a certain bareness, the bareness of one’s own bare life”. At the end of her exhaustive enquiry, Parker accepts that the nihilistic life is one of continual process and creative response, rather than securing solutions. She reconciles herself to the restlessness inherent to motherhood – and to life in general – and resolves to stay in pursuit of the unknown, on a hunt defined by uncertainty. She settles for questions. In the end, both Parker and Vincent lean into their pain – and it’s not a peaceful business for either of them. But as these shimmering books show, the inward turn is brimming with creative possibilities: it holds a promise all of its own.

Liz Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.