Fiona McGregor (1)

Fiona McGregor's writing seems to be very place-oriented, and in this work the place is largely Paris, as seen from her Australian perspective. Having an Australian perspective myself, I related well to this. This is also a story about family relationships, the narrator's own and the family for whom she works as an au pair. I enjoyed McGregor's observations of family life, especially the narrator's own. I did find the French family a little perplexing, in particular the child's behaviour. I think Ms McGregor is trying to show us that family dysfunction can take many forms. Having recently read a later work by the same author I can see that she has matured in the past 20 years (as one would hope!) but there is an underlying element in both her early and late work which attracts me to her reading: her observation of the power of small elements of interaction in relationships.… (more)

This book is excellent. And I say that having approached it with the expectation that I probably wouldn't like it at all. I saw it on the library shelf and read the publisher-elicited quotes by well known Australian authors on the cover and thought "yeah, right". Then I read the blurb, and thought "Hmmm...sounds like I could relate to these characters (Marie King is 59 . . . has lived a rather conventional life on Sydney's affluent north shore..)". And indeed I did relate to the characters and their situations, even to the point that the main character is referred to a doctor who is obviously based on a real doctor - mine! She finds she has cancer (as I have also found), has pet issues (yep), property issues, Sydney climate issues, one gay child (me too). Those connections made the book especially interesting to me, but even aside from that I reckon this is a quality piece of writing that anyone could find to be a cut above the average. Actually, my only criticism is that it reads a little too much as a book directed to Sydney-siders. It has references to places that would be obscure to non-Sydney people, and acronyms that non-Sydney people would need to Google to understand. I'm not sure whether the average reader might find these references a little too impenetrable and with a relevance that is completely lost. That said, however, I have no hesitation in giving it 5 stars and looking for more work by this author.… (more)

Women have been reinventing themselves in the novel ever since Elizabeth Bennett but Marie King in Indelible Ink is something else again. Fiona McGregor’s fourth novel has been widely praised, but I read most of Indelible Ink with a sense of fascinated disdain for its central character. Rebellious adolescents are one thing – but a privileged middle-aged women rebelling against her awful children by getting drunk and being sick all over a sofa in a furniture store? Traipsing round Kings’ Cross to get herself plastered in tattoos? Whatever would Jane Austen have thought about that?

Maybe Austen would have understood. Lizzy Bennett’s preoccupation was all about negotiating her way through society’s expectations and constraints to find a life that would satisfy her sense of self-respect, integrity and individuality. Today’s middle-aged women in transition to a new stage in their lives feel the same imperative: it informs Enza Gandolfo’s recent novel Swimming and it’s the underlying issue in Indelible Ink.

The novel expands on the theme of women subverting expectations in Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Warning’ :

Read the rest of this review at
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/indelible-ink-by-fiona-mcgregor/… (more)