Gabrielle Carey, author of Puberty Blues with Kathy Lette, has just published a memoir, Waiting Room, and she discusses it and her sadness over the recent death of her mother, with Lissa Christopher for "The Sydney Morning Herald".
Amid all the sadness, Carey is also experiencing "this rush of things I want to write. I'm beginning to believe that maybe all my life, the way to deal with pain has been to transform it into art - if what I do is art - to transform it into something else, take it out of yourself and put it somewhere else that makes it bearable."
In Waiting Room, Carey describes the drive to write as a symptom of malfunction.
"Once, when Brigie [Carey's daughter] was about eight, I thought I noticed the kind of withdrawn behaviour that I had exhibited as a child - the kind of psychology that leads a person to go silent, to ruminate and then, finally, to write things down. I went into an immediate panic and arranged an appointment with a child psychologist."
Despite Carey's fears, however, the writing condition is not manifest in Brigid, now an adult. "She's into fashion and beauty," Carey says, seeming pleased - and yet not so pleased. "My children are much more rounded healthy individuals than I am."
Most of Waiting Room was written about seven years ago, when Joan Carey was diagnosed with a brain tumour. It describes her catastrophic memory loss and muses on her taciturn, stoic-to-a-fault approach to life; the role of the middle-aged parent caught between the needs of their own children and an ailing parent; and Carey's passionate desire to know her mother more intimately.
