Planned for release in early 2025.

REGRET HORIZON: A MEMOIR

In 2008 my mother and my first husband died within three weeks of each other, unleashing a torrent of discoveries about myself and my failings. It is a “true” story, inasumuch as any memoir can be true, informed by my anthropological experiences of loss and death in other cultures, as well as our own. It aims to engage the contemporary discourse about death, grief and resilience and recommends self-forgiveness and acceptance.

“Regret Horizon invites readers on a poignant journey through a labyrinth of feeling, as the demands of cruel practicality undermine everything the author has take for granted in her normal busy high-achieving life. Set against the backdrop of a culture often uncomfortable with the rawness of death and grieving, this memoir charts the author’s painful efforts to embrace resilience and the transformative power of loss. Sadly, though, she fails at this socially expected task, and instead seeks her own way through confusion and disillusion. Finally, the best she can achieve is a kind of stoic acceptance”.

The book explores the power of social codes, the struggles arising from legal and bureaucratic constraints and the demand for self-suppression in the face of death. Illusory attachments and fragile bonds are forced to the surface. Conventional notions of closure and timelines for healing make no sense. Grief is a messy, nonlinear journey, and healing, if that is even possible, involves embracing and accepting the shattered pieces of one’s own existence, in spite of others’ expectations.

Final edits and feedback have delayed the release of REGRET HORIZON, although it should be coming soon: proposed release date in early 2025.

Although this is a stand-alone book, it will be the first of a series of autobiographical writings to appear under the title OUTSIDE THE FRAME. The following book, Defiant Daughter, describes my childhood and adolescence in the context of generations of Australian family trauma. A short narrative of life as a very young mother and anthropology student at Sydney University in the turbulent 1960s will follow. Subsequent volumes are memoirs of specific times and places:  my first fieldwork during 1968-69 in remote Arnhem Land, tentatively titled Mastery and Maternity; my time in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea with my partner, anthropologist Nick Modjeska (currently titled Jungle Trouble; and a musing on my professional life, perhaps to be called Bad Anthropologist.

For other writing, see the entry on this site under FICTION.