BOOKS with MEG MASON
TAKE MY ADVICE Miles Franklin’s celebrated novel, My Brilliant Career, offers clear insights into the mind of a teenager.
It is a long time since I have walked, not by mistake, into the parenting aisle of a bookshop. When my daughters were babies, I craved instruction, I wanted experts telling me what to do and how to do it, preferably at what time and in very basic language. If Gina Ford said blackout blinds, I was at Spotlight in the first sanctioned window of the feed–wake–sleep cycle. If Robin Barker told me scrunched-up newspaper in an onion bag solves boredom for babies eight months and up, dawn found me digging through the recycling, wondering if a damp Domayne catalogue would also work, wishing she had been specific on that score. But then, the children reach a certain age, or you do, and you’re less inclined towards advice. Feeling you’ve either worked it out or just made your bed, parenting-wise, and if you haven’t been doing Active
Listening since the beginning —being more of the Active Shouting Until You Taste Metal school of thought—meaningful nodding can’t be introduced to any effect now. Even as the teenage years hove into view, I didn’t seek out related texts, not wishing to pay money to be made afraid of these years, not wanting to believe they can only be terrible. But I have just read one by accident, picking it up as literature, unsure now why My Brilliant Career has not been rejacketed as What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Thirteen-year-old and shifted from Fiction to Parenting Teens. If you were doing what you were meant to at high school, not rocking on two legs of your chair using liquid paper nail polish for the absolute bulk of it, you have read the 1901 Australian classic already, saving us all a plot summary. Still, then, it would have been in
total identification with Sybylla, the 16-year-old protagonist created by a then 16-year-old author. Not as a parent who needs to be reminded of what it feels like to be this age, and advice and assurance that it’s not you and your insistence on breathing that are to blame for the many peaks, troughs, tensions and ecstasies that characterise weekday afternoons. And it’s not them either. Eye-rolling; the first time a child uses the phrase ‘no offence’; or a sudden inability to put a schoolbag anywhere except right in the doorway are all developmental milestones, akin to rolling over and first steps, just less thrilling when you are the victim of them. It’s just the two of you in combination. As Sybylla says on behalf of our teenagers, ‘my mother is a good woman—a very good woman—and I am, I think, not quite all criminality,
