She remembers the last time she saw her, in an agitated state in the psychiatric unit at Hastings Hospital. \u201cDon\u2019t come in,\u201d she warned Redgrave, then in her early 20s. \u201cThe germs will get you!\u201d <\/p>\n
And she remembers a phone call from her father on the day Nanie died, aged 87, telling her not to come from Auckland for the funeral. \u201cYour grandmother had a miserable life,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Redgrave\u2019s new memoir, The Unfortunate Lunatic, is the story of her search for Evelyn \u2013 not the \u201cmad grandmother\u201d who behaved so oddly but the intelligent, acerbic, rather snobby woman she never truly knew.<\/p>\n
A trained nurse and midwife, Evelyn was hospitalised when Redgrave\u2019s father, Jim \u2013 one of five children \u2013 was just a few weeks old.<\/p>\n
Author Tess Redgrave’s grandmother Evelyn Macalister, right, and Evelyn’s sister, Isobel, as schoolgirls, circa 1910. “The photo haunted me,” she says. “Why did my young grandmother look so sad?”<\/p>\n
That kind of thing wasn\u2019t talked about back then, although research suggests a vulnerability to mental illness can be passed down through the generations. <\/p>\n
A journalist, novelist and former editor of Auckland University\u2019s alumni magazine Ingenio, Redgrave too has suffered black periods throughout her life, including a crippling bout of clinical depression in her mid-30s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more I began to think about it, the more I understood my grandmother was marginalised in my family\u2019s history because of her mental illness,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I took my daily dose of lithium, I started to feel a powerful link to her. I knew she was a part of my story, and I wanted to bring her in close.\u201d<\/p>\n
The title of her book doesn\u2019t refer to Evelyn but to her father, Christopher Hume Macalister, Redgrave\u2019s great-grandfather.<\/p>\n
The 33-year-old doctor, who suffered from what was then termed \u201crecurrent melancholia\u201d, choked to death on a sip of milk in 1896 while a patient at Ashburn Hall asylum in Dunedin.<\/p>\n
A week earlier, he\u2019d attempted suicide by stabbing himself repeatedly in the neck. <\/p>\n
Christopher Hume Macalister, Redgrave’s great-grandfather, died in distressing circumstances at 33 after spending time in a mental asylum.<\/p>\n
A booklet on the Macalisters by a family historian referred to Christopher dying at 33 from \u201cill health\u201d. After applying for his coroner\u2019s report, Redgrave discovered the truth was much grimmer.<\/p>\n
Newspaper reports revealed the family had brought a case against Ashburn Hall for neglect, leading to a government inquiry into what the presiding judge called the \u201ctreatment of the unfortunate lunatic Macalister\u201d.<\/p>\n
Now back in Hawke\u2019s Bay, Redgrave completed a Master of Creative Writing while working at Auckland University and in 2018 published her first novel, Gone to Pegasus, about two women in the suffrage movement in Dunedin in the 1890s.<\/p>\n
\u201cVery quickly, this character William, who was in and out of Seacliff [psychiatric hospital], came into the story,\u201d she says. \u201cObviously that was my great-grandfather and I knew the next thing to do was investigate him further.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe weird thing is that I thought if I had any issues in my background, it was him, when I\u2019d grown up with a grandmother doing some pretty peculiar things. It came quite late when I suddenly realised she was a part of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Redgrave\u2019s memoir is a fascinating and often disturbing insight into the history of mental health care in New Zealand through the lens of her family.<\/p>\n
Evelyn was first hospitalised in her 20s and later given electric shock treatment, cycling in and out of care all her life. Among the meticulous notes she kept was a list of what she took with her into hospital each time: her handbag, her pearls, her Bible, and writing paper. <\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the most moving moments in her letters is when she writes, \u2018I want to go home to look after the home\u2019. That\u2019s the line that really undid me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evelyn\u2019s erratic behaviour and the many difficult decades Jim Regrave spent helping to care for her damaged him, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel a lot of compassion for my father,\u201d she says. \u201cHe was terrific in many ways, but he didn\u2019t have that attachment and warmth in his childhood from which he could build an emotional world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel huge compassion for my grandmother, too, which I didn\u2019t have before, when she was just my mad grandmother. Now I\u2019ve found her as a real person.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her memoir, Redgrave traces a history of mental illness back through multiple generations of her family.<\/p>\n
The Unfortunate Lunatic also candidly navigates Redgrave\u2019s bumpy ride through marriage, motherhood and sexual identity while struggling to keep her own demons at bay. <\/p>\n
Her two adult children and sister have been \u201cincredibly supportive\u201d, she says. When her son told her she was about to become a grandmother for the first time, she asked to be called Nanie.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the big things about writing the memoir has been understanding what was behind me and around me that might have affected who I am, because I had no sense of that as a kid. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, a big part of it is being seen by the world, and that requires me to stand in my own shoes and be comfortable with that in a way I haven\u2019t been before.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Unfortunate Lunatic by Tess Redgrave (The Cuba Press, $38) is out now.<\/p>\n
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with a focus on social issues and the arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She remembers the last time she saw her, in an agitated state in the psychiatric unit at Hastings…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[27951,1863,15364,1862,6179,102040,2109,32255,14322,301726,22263,134,29418,78,296,6176,301724,2064,9462,117,111,139,69,5591,4517,5970,301725,131586,27043,213,427,6795,223,109395,149003,6923],"class_list":["post-612654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-19th","tag-back","tag-century","tag-dating","tag-died","tag-digs","tag-family","tag-familys","tag-grandmother","tag-greatgrandfather","tag-happened","tag-health","tag-ill","tag-in","tag-into","tag-legacy","tag-lunatic","tag-madness","tag-memoir","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-odd","tag-past","tag-really","tag-redgrave","tag-secrecy","tag-shocking","tag-sports","tag-story","tag-tess","tag-the","tag-uncovers","tag-unfortunate","tag-what"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}