At the August meeting of the WLS Evening Book Club we discussed The Bookseller at the End of the World, the NZ-bestselling memoir in which Ruth Shaw recounts the wild and heartbreaking life that brought her to run two adorable bookstores in Manapouri. Our lively chat ran immediately into an age-old question: How do you judge a book without judging the person who wrote it?
We were universal in our affection for Shaw herself. How could you not admire a woman who sailed all over the Pacific, defying pirates and personal tragedies of every stripe, before finding peace and true love in Fjordland? But of course we only met Shaw through her book, which some of us loved and some didn’t quite. Hmm.
There’s some incandescent pain in these pages, captured in heartbreaking clarity. We all were floored by the horror of a country dance that quickly turns to a harrowing sexual assault. There are also many colorful chapters of her years spent running away from that pain, chapters some of us felt ran away from the reader, too.
We sensed a possible generational split here. Younger club members wanted Shaw to stop and unpack her feelings each time she pulled up anchor and sailed off to Papua New Guinea, Tahiti, or Australia. An older reader, meanwhile, was satisfied with the narrator’s brief nods at the shadows chasing her. Shaw bravely carried on until she found love and home: wasn’t that story enough?
Two further readings explore the question. Chanel Miller’s searing bestseller Know My Name is a gorgeously unsparing reclamation of life after trauma; the fifty years between and Miller’s assaults seem to have changed both everything and nothing. Meanwhile, Parul Seghal’s much-discussed New Yorker essay “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” argues that our fictional characters have become trapped by their tragic backstories. The question holds for memoir, too. Telling that hard old story is a path to freedom, yes. But surely that freedom demands we write a bright new chapter? Maybe even open a wee bookshop somewhere?
NEXT UP: For 7th September we’re reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, and for 5th October it’s Candy House by Jennifer Egan. We meet on Zoom, with readers joining from across the Wairarapa, and all are welcome. To sign up for a library copy and the Zoom link, visit wlseveningbookclub.substack.com or email dan@wls.org.nz. Come join the conversation!
