The other night I dreamed it was my last day of high school. I was gathering schoolbooks when something caught my eye: lettuce leaves, lying on the carpet. Perfect! I thought, scooping them up and packing them. Now I won’t be hungry at university next year! I woke still glowing with pride.
Since that dream, I’ve been thinking about how neatly education arranges life into endings and beginnings. You finish one segment, take a summer holiday, and step into the next – nervous, excited – and equipped, if you have my sort of foresight, with a handful of rotting lettuce leaves. But grownup life is more chaotic. There are plenty of potential beginnings – jobs, partners, dietary changes, but nobody has drawn up a schedule. Changes tend to be flung at you, or depend on your own efforts.
In my novel Gravity Is the Thing, changes are both flung at and chosen by Abigail, owner-manager of the Happiness Cafe. Back when she was a teenager, Abigail’s brother vanished. Around the same time, she started receiving chapters in the mail from a self-help book called The Guidebook. Now, 20 years later, she’s invited to a retreat to learn “the truth” about The Guidebook.
The absence of Abigail’s brother is central to her story. A missing loved one is a particularly traumatic loss because it isn’t entirely a loss. At any moment, the person could reappear. There’s no ending, so there can’t be a new beginning: life without the loved one cannot start. In Gravity, I wanted to explore the promises of the self-help industry in this context of ambiguous loss: much like hope, self-help can be both transformative and destructive.
At first, the idea of choosing 10 books about new beginnings alarmed me. I couldn’t think of any. Then I realised that all novels have at least one crisis, discovery or transformation, and each of these triggers new beginnings. Essentially, then, this is a list of books that have been special to me (not the most special, those would be the books of my sisters, Liane and Nicola) or that have shaped me as a writer or person, angled to catch the light.
1. Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
Phryne Fisher, sexy, sassy and newly arrived in Melbourne, Australia, decides to become a private detective. This is the first in a series that is pure, witty, intelligent escapism, each book improving on the one before. I read these in the bath, with chocolate, whenever I’m worried or sad, and everything is instantly better.
2. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
In his own way, Jackson Brodie is just as charismatic, sexy and capable as Phryne Fisher. Case Histories, the first of Brodie’s stories, has him embarking on his new career as private detective. I read this many years ago, on a train between Toronto and Montreal, just after a miscarriage, and cried at almost every page. It was exactly what I needed. I already admired Kate Atkinson, but this was when I fell in love with her exuberant, powerful prose.
3. In the Mood by Laura Bloom
Set in Sydney in 1946, In the Mood depicts a young couple attempting to restart their marriage after the husband’s return from war. Bloom’s writing is exquisite, and her meticulous dissection of a relationship frayed by secrets and trauma is reminiscent of Henry James (without the excessive sub-clauses). I’ve always been drawn to novels like this that take the domestic sphere as seriously as it deserves.
4. Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee
Everyone should read this children’s book set in the 1970s. Lenny’s brother, Davy, was born “six days after Neil Armstrong took his famous step and everyone was still crazy with moon fever”. But Lenny’s mother has a “dark heart feeling” about Davy, a feeling “as big as the sky kept inside a thimble”. Davy begins to grow, and does not stop, and so begin years of doctor and hospital visits, worry and hope. The kindness of neighbours, the distraction of Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopaedia, Davy’s winning charm and Lenny’s determination, complete an immersive tale about loss and its transformative powers. It will make you sob.
5. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
Most of the stories in this collection explore new beginnings of different kinds: how to become “the other woman”, how to be the child of newly divorced parents. In the succinctly titled How, we learn how to start a doomed love affair: “Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale.” Moore’s prose is poetic, sharp and devastatingly funny. Just when you think there’s nothing new to say about relationships, Moore cracks open a fresh layer and confounds you with her insight.
6. Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones
I usually write for young people so I often read children’s books. My favourites are funny, emotionally authentic and contain practical magic. Wynne Jones’s books, like those of Ellen Raskin and Sally Gardner, make my soul breathe a sigh of relief. The Chrestomanci books are set in parallel worlds to ours, and feature protagonists discovering their magical abilities and setting out to develop them. The charming Christopher Chant appears just in time, offering elegant solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
7. Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce
A comic delight of a tale about friendship and love set against the grim landscape of London during the blitz, this novel sensitively conveys how life, even in tragedy and heartbreak, can be humorous and hopeful. Emmeline Lake accidentally takes a new job typing up letters for an advice columnist at a women’s magazine in London, 1941, which rules an extensive range of subjects out of bounds. Defying her instructions, Emmeline begins to answer them herself.
8. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
I read this novel on an aeroplane and it made me laugh often and cry more. Eleanor, nearly 30, has been leading a precise, guarded and solitary life, holding herself together through addiction and routine. Then a singer walks on to a stage, and Eleanor falls instantly in love: “He blazed … I sat forward on my seat, edged closer. At last. I’d found him.” A marvel of humour and heartbreak, Eleanor Oliphant reveals how a new friendship can begin to unravel the traumas that are knotted deep within us.
9. Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
A book about new beginnings that stopped my breath and knocked me sideways. This is an eviscerating study of the beginnings of Australian colonialism. It collects compelling evidence that Indigenous Australians were not, as the prevailing historical narrative maintains – and as required by the law of terra nullius – wandering hunter gatherers, but had established both agriculture and dwellings.
10. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
This novel opens with a group of children starting out on their life journeys, and has them guide us through to their old age and death in six exquisite, first-person accounts. I read it in high school and it was my first encounter with language so intensely beautiful. It is lyrical, inventive, self-referential and determined to excavate relentlessly in pursuit of truth.
• Gravity Is the Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty is published by Allen & Unwin.
