Chloe Hooper lays out her memories in quick strokes: two young children, an older couple, and something suddenly happens, making domestic life precious and strange. The father of her children is Don Watson (writer, historian and famous Keating speechwriter). The something: a common cancer and a rare mutation. Hooper, two novels and two critically acclaimed investigative nonfiction works to her credit, turn her human and forensic gaze to the pain and private ruin of her own family. It feels like a novel, its characters fascinating, moving and funny; that they are real people seems like a secondary and extraordinary feat.
Bedtime Story is dedicated to both children but is directed primarily at the older one. Hooper pores over centuries of children’s books, looking for stories that will help her talk to him “about real darkness.” She is not only looking for a language to address the subject of Watson’s disease, but for her to somehow teach herself to be less afraid.
Which is not exactly the same as seeking comfort. Traditional children’s stories, she writes, come from “death-soaked” folktales and have little interest in calming anyone down. The bizarre horror and joy of life is very much the point, and there is a sense of tangible, conniving relief from Hooper (his own fiction generally described as “Gothic”) when he points out that even later, watered-down versions of these stories can rarely be fully sanitized. The “fairy tale model” takes on increasing relevance in his own life: heroes, in “an enchanted forest or an oncology ward,” suddenly forced to play by new arbitrary and perverse rules.
Cancer treatment is expensive, even for those like Watson and Hooper who have private health insurance. Access to potentially life-saving medical trials is a challenge of time, luck, and money: the staunchly progressive Watson finds them “obscene,” “rich people’s health care”; Hooper just wants him to get better; they can’t afford it anyway. As they negotiate the hospital and the brutal waiting game of chemotherapy, his voice gleams with trepidation, humor and uncertain rage: he is aware of how disease lays bare the systems our societies have in place to care for one another, and the gaps in those systems. . She is as aware of the hypocrisies revealed as each of us dodge and weave around them, grasping at any advantage to protect those we hold dear. Negotiate with the witch. Take the gold.
If children’s stories contain our myths, Hooper also sees that they contain our blind spots. Western children’s literature in particular grapples with them: racist stereotypes, dispossession and loss whitewashed into an “immortal story” of terra nullius and pioneering bravery; anthropomorphized animals whose charming adventures erase the present threat of their own demise. Hooper, looking for ways to talk to his children about “everything that’s missing,” inevitably widens his lens to the climate crisis. There is something to tie together here, about history, death, and global warming: irreversible events, the narcotic dangers of nostalgia, the need to face facts. But there’s no “teachable moment,” and Hooper’s attempt to improvise one feels didactic and contrived. Because ultimately she’s struggling with how we can control ourselves in the face of things that we can’t control. There’s no answer. And Bedtime Story, like the best moments of her other writing, is most notable for its ability to contain contradictory truths: children crave and deserve frankness; too much truth before sleep and “no one can sleep”.
Exhaust is critical, sometimes. A story can be a garden between worlds, where for every missing fairy tale mother or beheaded brother there is a miraculous elixir, a Fisher King who, with the right words, could be saved. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion questions the delusions of happy endings: our vulnerability “to the persistent message that we can avoid death.” But in children’s stories, says Hooper, “there’s no shame in being a fanciful.” She realizes how many of her favorites are from grief-stricken writers, and suggests that they contain more than mere wishful thinking: In the worlds of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Roald Dahl, even Eric Carle, she sees “a philosophical framework for dealing with the dark.”
Despite its broader themes, this book is an intensely intimate portrait of a “cracked” home. For Watson’s family, his diagnosis is a backwards fairy tale, in which “all the riches of the world will be rescinded at an unspecified but imminent time.” Hooper’s observations are embedded with fierce, personal poetry reminiscent of Sharon Olds (look up Rite of Passage, or Size and Sheer Will) – her son’s face is “a fine-boned instrument,” his football game “a ballet of chaos and will be “. She is pained by his “peculiar vigilance” and “polite caution,” and when Watson (“all six feet of his stiff, sun-reddened, impatient, amused, and tender self”) sends the children to the bed every night. , delighting them with their own improvised stories. And she sees him looking at them, “unable to turn away…allowing himself only briefly to show the gods what she loves most.” Humming under each line is Scheherazade’s plea: time, more time.
through the pages, Illustrator Anna Walker’s tranquil watercolors bloom and fade—spooky trees, a dark river, a lone seagull—sometimes taking over completely when words fail. At a certain point, death “defies language,” writes Hooper. And yet we still cling to prayers. One way to get rid of a nightmare, the “annihilating shame” of terrors we haven’t processed in the light of day, is to describe it. Physicians are now trained in “narrative competence.” The right words may not save anyone, but they help. And time and time again, Hooper, like Didion, Lewis, Yiyun Li, Helen McDonald, or Claire-Louise Bennett, finds them in the books. Bedtime Story is a song about “the dazzle, the secret soak” of reading.
“The right story,” as she writes, “can also break the fever.”
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Chloe Hooper’s Bedtime Story is available now in Australia ($34.99, Simon & Schuster). Hooper speaks at the Sydney Writers Festival, which opens on Tuesday 17th May.