This is a marvellous exploration of family dynamics, and the possibilities that life may offer as children grow into adulthood from less-than-perfect upbringings. Shirm is a master of short story fiction, and this book has 16 standalone chapters, which together form a cohesive, novel-length, female-focussed narrative. This is centred on the family of sisters, Susie and Allison, their mother, Bernie, and Allison’s daughter, Monica. Sometimes they have all ‘felt themselves losing their grip on their lives’.

The family’s been brought up with a lack of emotional depth, so Shirm’s decision to examine a spectrum of emotions in the first and third chapters (‘The Crying Room’ and ‘Laugh Track’) is apposite. Bernie’s mothering style was distant; Allison gaslights Susie and Monica; Susie is never certain of her or her family’s feelings; and Monica couldn’t handle Allison any longer and went to live with Susie. Monica’s conflicted struggle with Allison is best explained in the chapter, ‘Witness’, which is told entirely in strikeouts, with the writer using a sidebar to explain to the editor/reader that it’s too harsh.

The narrative becomes self-referential in ‘The Writing Class’, which details Monica’s class at university. She writes a short story about her family called ‘Porcelain’, which appears as the following chapter. Structurally, Shirm makes clever use of parallel imagery: Sam’s school behaviour is poor. His schoolbag is opened and something rotten is smelt.

The Crying Room is an original and utterly captivating study into the various manifestations of familial love, written with great passion and insight.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gretchen Shirm is the author of a collection of short stories Having Cried Wolf, for which she named a 2011 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her first novel Where the Light Falls, was shortlisted for the 2017 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Visit Gretchen Shirm’s website