‘Night, Ma’ by Elizabeth Knox
Elizabeth Knox is known to many of us as the author of ‘Vintner’s Luck’, arguably the most famous of her 19 books of fiction, collections of essays and novellas.
As such, Kiwi readers are quick to claim her as one of our own, beloved and respected in her field of writing.
In ‘Night, Ma’, Knox takes us out of her imagination and directly into her experience of writing a memoir of three harrowing years in her life, 2009-2012. This is a deeply thoughtful, personal offering that was 10 years in the writing. As Knox comes to terms with not only the mental illness and sectioning of her older sister, the MND diagnosis and death of her mother and, the murder of her brother-in-law all within three years of each other, she also grapples with the individual and shared histories of each player that preceded these devastating events.
‘Night, Ma’, is not a revelatory, sensational, tell-all type memoir and nor is it a misery memoir. It is an invitation into Knox’s (and her family’s) world as they live their way through repeated devastating loss and the self-examination that comes with it. There’s no standing back being wise after the fact, however much Knox herself thought it was possible, as she attests to in the opening chapter. The reader experiences these years the same way Knox did – blow by blow, blow after blow. To have walked this path once, survived and then to choose to walk it again in order to write it down is a feat of some magnitude. Great reading, available at your local bookshop.
