Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 76052 895 9
eISBN 978 1 76087 284 7
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover photograph: Anna Robinson
For all the girls I’ve loved before
In celebration of the grand legacies of
Rowena Bowditch
Dr Claire Weekes
and
John Patrick Hedigan
Contents
A brief letter of introduction
1 Happiness
2 When I was five
3 Your own kind of girl
4 Amazing life
5 Thin skin
6 Storms and other weather patterns
7 The thing about grief
8 God and Frank
9 Empty pockets
10 The story of music
11 On this side
12 Human being
Epilogue
Additional resources
Acknowledgements
A brief letter of introduction
Thank you very kindly for finding your way to the first page of what I suspect will be the most honest story I will ever have the mixed pleasure of writing.
To be clear, this is not a memoir that details my (let’s be honest, relatively modest) success as a musician—most of the stories in this book come well before any of that. Meaning, sadly, there’s not much in here by way of dirt on all the famous people I’ve (never actually) slept with, or even just … met (with one notable exception). As for any subtle bragging about fancy titles the world may or may not have given me? No. That’s pretty much covered in my short bio at the start. The fanciest title you’re gonna hear me called from here on in is probably my childhood nickname, Fatty-boom-bah (which I’m not sure really counts).
This is just the story I promised myself—aged twenty-one—that I would one day be brave enough, and well enough, and alive enough, to write.
At the time, that thought—that I might one day actually do something useful with my life—seemed outside of my reality, and yet, at the same time, it acted like a tiny flare of hope just in the moment I needed it most.
What were the chances of me coming good on that hope?
Slim.
At age twenty-one, as you’ll soon understand, I wasn’t exactly renowned for my ability to follow through. Quite the contrary. My list of failures was already long and shameful, and if I knew how many more I would have to suffer before I ‘made something of my life’, I’m not sure I would have had the gumption to keep going.
And, still, I latched again and again to the memory of this hopeful feeling: that one day I would write a book, one that proved I was more than this.
That was twenty-one years ago. What took me so long?
Well, look, I’ve been a bit busy. That is true. But that’s not the real reason.
Even on the day I promised I would write this book, I knew it would be a long time before I was ready to share it with anyone. I needed the hope of the promise, but what I didn’t need was the pressure of rushing it. And so, as a work-around, I added one little caveat—I could start writing this book whenever I was ready, but I didn’t have to actually finish it until I was really, really, really old. Say, forty? (How very rude.)
And so here I am, decades later, ‘old lady Bowditch’, now digging deep into my memory, my childhood diaries, and my song lyrics, to pull out stories from a time before I knew myself, and before there was any indication that anyone else would ever get to know me either.
A short word about the title of this book; it comes from a song I wrote in 2008 called ‘Your Own Kind Of Girl’. It’s the one I still get lots of letters about, and still find hardest to perform on stage. Despite best intentions and dogged preparation, I often choke up somewhere around the second verse. As confessed already (both in the song and earlier in this letter), for much of my early life I lived in the hope that someone, somewhere, would tell me that I was ‘more than this’—that I was more than my failures, more than my grief, more than the terrible stories I told myself about myself. I suspect that’s why I find this song so hard to finish; because that is exactly what my audience does tell me, every time I let them see who I am. They remind me that these stories are common—so very common. They remind me how beautiful life can be when we find ways to share them, and live through them, and change them. This, l suspect, is the loop that allowed me the courage to finally, finally, finish this book.
This is the story of the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we believe them.
It goes a little something like this …
CB xo
P.S. An additional note for those fellow travellers who, for whatever reason, find affinity with the term ‘Sensitive Creative Type’, it’s for you I mention here that this memoir contains stories that were difficult for me to write, and may be difficult for you to read, depending on where you’re at. Should you at any point feel yourself in need of comfort, reassurance or emotional support during our time together, just head to the back of the book. There you’ll find a section called ‘Additional resources’ filled with helpful info.
1
Happiness
Are you ready yet
To be happy?
‘ARE YOU READY YET?’
(The Winter I Chose Happiness, 2012)
I used to wonder if there was a name for whatever it was that was wrong with my brain.
My memory, for a start.
I could be quite good at remembering small things, like smells, and spelling, and sounds.
As a child, when I heard a song on the radio, I’d find my way back to its melody afterwards by the pictures it left in my mind. To me, songs were things with shapes and names and colours and temperatures. Easy to remember. Impossible to forget. They were as real, and alive, as pets.
So, yes, I could be quite good with small things.
It was
