And it\u2019s to fiction that Knox will return to just as soon as possible. \u201cThat is where I feel I\u2019m allowed to be whole and alive,\u201d she tells me. Night, Ma \u2013 a memoir that traverses transformational episodes from childhood to adulthood \u2013 is the longest project Knox has ever worked on, and the most difficult. Over a period of three-and-a-half years between 2008 and 2012, Knox\u2019s sister was hospitalised with a psychotic break, her brother-in-law was murdered in Rarotonga and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Night, Ma is a shifting chronicle of these \u201ccalamities\u201d, these night-mares (the title reads differently after a while), that force the narrator \u2013 a time-travelling Knox \u2013 to \u201ctunnel back\u201d through her childhood, taking herself apart, to contextualise and humanise one of the most gruelling periods of her, and her family\u2019s, lives.<\/p>\n
The first 50 pages of Night, Ma contain a series of shocks nestled between vivid memories of a more comforting kind; like cats. Cats slink, soft-footed, through this book like familiars to good witches. There\u2019s the time Knox\u2019s sister, a \u201cwaywardly fanciful and chillingly experimental child\u201d, kidnapped a toddler and made Knox her accomplice, a foreshadowing of increasingly perturbing behaviour; there\u2019s a brief, brutal episode of sexual violence against Knox\u2019s father when he was just a boy. \u201cDad left his own skin and never got properly back into it.\u201d There\u2019s the revelation that Knox\u2019s other sister, Sara, is a victim of abuse; as is Knox herself.<\/p>\n
What emerges from the surfacing of such detail is the mind of a writer, sister and daughter at work on many complex truths. \u201cYou have to ask yourself questions,\u201d says Knox of the process of excavating memory. \u201cHow do I feel about that? And why do I feel that way? You keep asking the same question, and over time, the answers change as you understand more about what you\u2019ve been through and how it shaped you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Knox (Photo: Ebony Lamb)<\/p>\n
The prodigious skill of the accomplished and singular prose stylist is married with a scarily good memory and a shimmering humanity that avoids overlaying hindsight and contemporary psychological diagnostics over the past and its people. Night, Ma shifts back and forth through time, assembling some logic from the shock of life\u2019s cruelest and most illogical turns. And yet, Night, Ma consistently manages to convey joy, compassion and humour. It is nothing less than the best of literature about the worst of times.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo take things seriously is also to put the humour and the glow and the warmth and the beauty and worthwhileness of things,\u201d says Knox when we talk. In the book, Knox\u2019s sister, Jo, is as charismatic and charming as she is troubling. Knox\u2019s mother, too, is as vivid and mischievous as she is unable to protect her daughter (Sara) from abuse by a neighbourhood predator. Even while this is a memoir of tremendous pain, confusion and anguish, it is also an account of love, care and empathy. Nobody is reduced to what they did or didn\u2019t do to the narrator.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What struck me repeatedly is Knox\u2019s tone, which, she says, she chipped away at for years. Tone, we agree, is almost impossible to define but it\u2019s to do with the atmosphere of the writing: the shape of the doorway within which you enter into the material, it\u2019s the lighting and the sound and the temperature, too. Night, Ma is a landscape of tone born from multiple selves collaborating on a plot too twisty and terrible to make up. There\u2019s Elizabeth the child, the teenager, the adult; there\u2019s the Elizabeth of the book \u2013 the narrator asking questions, close-reading her own memories. Then there\u2019s excerpts from her parents\u2019, and sister Sara\u2019s, diaries \u2013 prose I found both moving and perhaps an indication of where Knox gathered some of her talent. Here is Knox\u2019s father in 1963: \u201cJo is five this day; will go to school soon. I feel old. Elizabeth, crazy creature, thinks it\u2019s her birthday too. \u2018You had one in February,\u2019 I say. But she just fixes me with a stern brown eye and says, definitely, \u2018My birthday cake.’\u201d<\/p>\n
In a world of increasingly homogenised syntax thanks to generative AI, it is the richest of pleasures to read both Knox, and these brief portals into her parents\u2019 own minds. One of the joys of memoirs, of diaries, is the privilege of access to intensely private worlds \u2013 and when the writing is this good the reading of it is in turn transformational.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Knox talks about years of calamity as being in \u201cemotional quarantine\u201d: \u201cYou\u2019re just a mass of bad news. You feel pretty helpless. And I know that there are people going through that at any given moment, there are people going through that where they can\u2019t talk about.\u201d For Knox, part of publishing Night, Ma is that hope that it will comfort readers with the knowledge that they\u2019re not alone in their struggles.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When I think of Elizabeth Knox I think of someone who has an ability unlike anyone else I\u2019ve read to make words sit like architecture and air at once on the page; and somehow, in a way I am useless at articulating, infusing our minds with the enchanting and underrated prospect of the \u201cundecided\u201d. What I mean by this is the grace that Knox offers to every person in her non-fiction, every character in her fiction. Another facet of Knox\u2019s \u201cundecidedness\u201d is the reportage of experiences that turn the reader towards the possibility of more. In Night, Ma, this comes in the appearance of what Knox describes as \u201cthe green avalanche\u201d at the moment of her mother\u2019s death, which follows years of deteriorating health and a steep decline in quality of life.<\/p>\n
Night, Ma, Knox hopes, will offer empathy and comfort for anyone with experience of motor neurone disease. \u201cMotor neurone disease is a horror show,\u201d she writes. \u201cPeople caring for somebody who has it are just filling sandbags and putting them in place while the water rises.\u201d The slow, cruel changes to Knox\u2019s mother are frightening, heartbreaking, and are rendered in devastating, generous depth: \u201cBut within a week or two she had thrush in her mouth and then, as the weeks and months went on, thrust all the way through her oesophagus right down to her stomach. She\u2019d treat the stinging dryness with little lollipop-shaped sponges impregnated with a cooling gel. She\u2019d dip them in water and paint her gums and teeth. And then, when her hand became too weak and shaky, I\u2019d do it for her.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cgreen avalanche\u201d chapter is the final of the memoir and, again, an astonishingly generous moment with which to leave the reader. Knox and her sister, Sara, keep vigil over their dying mother. The cat, Cheeky, aware that the fundamental nature of its owner is shifting, walks to the window \u201cstiffly, mincing, like a cat facing an enemy \u2013 and went out.\u201d Soon after, Knox\u2019s mother stops breathing: \u201cMum was still in the room after her heart stopped. She was everywhere in the room. And then the green outside pushed up to the window and caught fire like everything catches fire whenever the Presence is there. Green light poured in the window.\u201d<\/p>\n
I will stop there. The rest ought to be read in full, when the reader has come through all that goes before.<\/p>\n
The \u201cgreen avalanche\u201d is related to what celebrated diarist Helen Garner calls \u201cthe mighty force\u201d. Garner\u2019s non-fiction was a crucial influence on Night, Ma \u2013 \u201cshe provided the model\u201d, Knox says. For Knox, the \u201cgreen avalanche\u201d is an \u201cit\u201d, a force that, she tells me, \u201cis wild and belongs to the world. It isn\u2019t human and it isn\u2019t a thing: it is an experience. Suddenly your senses widen in a way that you suddenly see it \u2013 and the moment you see it, it sees you and you delight it and it is wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Night, Ma is a book I\u2019ll return to; to pore over the sentences, the precision and the \u201cundecidedness\u201d. I urge readers to take comfort in its pain, strength in its questions and nourishment from its care.\u00a0<\/p>\n