Candidly honest, agonisingly sad at times, yet still bringing the life of a Greek Island alive and dancing off its pages, Aphrodite’s Breath is unusual in more than one way.
Susan Johnson, novelist and journalist, aged 62, accepts a redundancy from a Brisbane newspaper and invites Barbara, her 85-year-old mother, to spend a year with her on the island of Kythera, so they were no teenage backpackers.
This was no sudden whim by Susan as she had made several trips there and was looking forward to editing her latest novel and writing this memoir while living on the island with her mother. Anyone organising to leave their life in Australia for a year, and renting a house on Kythera, could expect hiccups in arrangements, but throw in the mother-daughter relationship, and sparks were soon flying. Several times Susan is reduced to lonely tears because she found her mother did not love Kythera as she did.
Guilt and shame followed an outburst against her mother, who found the house they had rented ‘not fit to live in, and freezing’, but Susan eventually found a different house for them which suited her mother better. It was a glorious Greek spring, Barbara even danced at various village festivals, and she returned to Brisbane with her son and his wife who came to visit. This had not been the idyllic island sojourn that Susan had planned, and even when isolated by COVID-19, first in London, and again on the island, her absent mother remained ‘the watchmaker who set my heart ticking’.
In dark times ahead for Susan, finally back in Australia, she found an account Barbara had written about her time on the island, claiming it was ‘a year well spent’. That is included as an epilogue to Susan’s memoir about mother-daughter relationships, but mostly, she claims, about love.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I was born in Brisbane but moved to Sydney at the age of three months, which is where I spent my childhood. My late father, John, was a Queenslander and my mother, Barbara, was from Sydney. I grew up around Sydney’s North Shore (St.Ives) and moved to Queensland with my family (to a pineapple farm) where I finished my last years of high school. I attended Nambour High (the same year as the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, but I don’t remember him, and I am sure he does not remember me). My last two years were spent at Clayfield College.
I’ve written 10 books: eight novels; a memoir, A Better Woman; and a non-fiction book, an essay, ‘On Beauty’, published by Melbourne University Press. Several of my books have been published in the UK, the US, and in European translation (French, Polish) as well as in Australia.
0 Comments