Juliet Rieden
Hannah Richell says An Ocean and a Day is her “most personal writing yet” and that open-wound candour provides the visceral backbone to a courageous memoir. From her bestselling novels – taut family dramas and most recently the crime thriller One Dark Night – Richell is known for sharp pacing and structural elegance. That literary sophistication is also on display in this deeply emotional endeavour, her first work of non-fiction.
The prose ebbs, flows and swells like the ocean in the title, darting back and forth across time to build tension. The author spent 10 years “scrawling” in diaries – capturing tsunamis of love and memories of the husband so cruelly taken from her – “to trap him on the page before the amputation is complete”. Those raw, contemporaneous sources became the very blood and guts of this book.
The story opens on Tamarama beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs – a stretch of rolling waves hiding dangerous rock formations that, she writes, “has loomed large in my mind”. It is a place she returns to repeatedly in her memoir as she has in life. How can she not? This is where her husband Matt Richell, then the chief executive of book publisher Hachette Australia, drowned in a surfing accident in 2014, an event that hit the headlines at the same time as she was learning about the unfathomable disaster. What follows is an attempt to make sense of that horrific turning point and to find a way forward for herself and their two young children.
Richell was working in her writer’s studio, a room she rented in a converted pub, when two plainclothes police knocked on the door of her home a few streets away. When she finally arrived, after a call from her husband’s PA, she knew a “Bad Thing” had entered the house.
The book then travels back 13 years to witness the moment Matt, fresh from a “finding myself in India” journey and bouncing with puppy-dog enthusiasm, is hired for the publishing job the author had hoped to be promoted into. Richell recalls her initial reaction to this seemingly confident 28-year-old was annoyance and resentment. Yet, in scenes reminiscent of a Richard Curtis romcom, the two fall in love, hanging out in cool bars and kissing in the rain.
They move from England to Australia and embark on a road trip around WA in a LandCruiser. Though Matt had previously declared he wasn’t interested in marriage or children – a bit of a bone of contention – within months, he proposed. They settle in Sydney, with Matt returning to publishing and Hannah working for a film company.
Their two children are playing in the adjacent room with the childminder when the police deliver the news: “Matt is dead.” He was 41.
Grief is a tricky thing to write about. The impossible sadness is tough to read. Yet Richell manages to walk a fine line, analysing her world for the reader while remaining very much in the eye of the storm. There are practical issues like money, work, the children, and what to do with her husband’s ashes.
Richell is impressively vulnerable in her storytelling. She misses sex and watches porn. She embarks on a disastrous one-night stand and signs up for dating sites. But the yawning gap – “the Matt-shaped void” – is ever-present. Readers traverse the stages of grief alongside her, denial through to anger, and at times, it feels that the necessary endpoint of acceptance is unreachable.
She’s unable to pick up her own fiction writing and rails that, contrary to popular wisdom, broken hearts are not fertile ground for creativity. Only they are. This work is not an indulgent therapy session; it is expertly crafted, peppered with literary references from Julian Barnes and W. H. Auden to Raymond Carver to Joan Didion. We can almost feel Matt smiling down on his wife, urging her on.
Love and pain are inextricably linked, and Richell starts to cherish both. After two years, she knows she can’t stay in their marital home or in Australia. Before moving back to England, she and the kids find a place to scatter Matt’s ashes. It is their son who says, “Daddy be free.” Heartbreaking and beautiful.
An Ocean and a Day by Hannah Richell is published by 4th Estate ($35).
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
