Paper Trail

According to the back cover of Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska’s latest collection of essays represents an attempt to follow the ‘paper trail’ of her own life, after ‘nearly thirty years of nosing in other people’s archives’. Readers who have enjoyed Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (2000) will find much to intrigue them in Part 1 of this collection, which is largely a series of intimate glimpses into her development as a writer. Like Helen Garner, writing and living for Modjeska are clearly two sides of the same coin, and both enterprises imply struggle, danger and passion. Poppy was arguably one of the most exciting books to appear in Australia in the 1990s. Modjeska’s descriptions of her efforts to find the right voice or voices for the book’s complex mix of biography, autobiography and fiction are especially fascinating. While her first book, Exiles at Home (1981), was ground-breaking, the gulf between its well-conducted research and the sophisticated self-conscious memoir that is Poppy is immense. How many graduate students must have the same experience of travelling ‘on forged papers’ in their academic work, of assuming a supposedly disinterested voice that ignores the personal ‘terra incognita’.