Book Review: Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh
WINNER OF THE READINGS NEW AUSTRALIAN FICTION PRIZE
Mary Anne is painfully aware that she’s not a good wife and not a good mother, and is slowly realising that she no longer wants to play either of those roles. One morning, she walks out of the family home in Wollongong, leaving her husband and teenage daughters behind.
Wounded by her mother’s abandonment, adolescent Vivian searches for meaning everywhere: true crime, boys’ bedrooms, Dolly magazine, a six-pack of beer. But when Vivian grows up and finds herself unhappily married and miserable in motherhood, she too sees no choice but to start over. Her daughter Evie is left reeling, and wonders what she could have done to make her mother stay.
Emma Darragh’s unflinching, tender and darkly funny debut explores what we give to our families and what we take from them—whether we mean to or not. The stories in Thanks for Having Me are like a shoebox full of old photos: they aren’t in chronological order and few are labelled. Looking at a family this way reveals things we don’t see when these moments are neatly organised. Except that within these pages are a few moments you wouldn’t want to hold up to the light.
Released February 2024
My Thoughts:Thanks for Having Me by Emma Darragh was my latest audio book, and what an amazing listen it was. The structure of this one is what makes it such an absorbing read, for it follows three generations of women from the same family, but in pieces, with no chronological order – a novel in stories, as it is described on the cover. I didn’t really know what that meant until I was in the thick of it.
The narration of this one was done by three different narrators, one for each of our main perspectives: Mary Anne, Vivian, and Evie. It’s a novel where you can think of each story as a random puzzle piece in the history of this family, a jumble of stories when regarded separately, but a full and meaningful portrait when finished and regarded as a whole.
Thanks for Having Me is about mothers and daughters. There are readers who will connect with this novel on a whole other level and then readers who will not. I think it depends on your own experiences with the mother load. The mothers in this novel leave their children, are struggling, and have failed their daughter(s). But this is only the surface story. The deeper we go, the further in, we become aware of so much more.
This novel is deeply nostalgic for those of us who were children in the 1980s and teenagers in the 1990s, with so many cultural references and nods to the Australian lifestyle as it was back then. And sociologically, this one is an exploration on the lives of Australian women in the mid to late 20th century and the intergenerational impacts this had on women coming of age in a society that was giving them more freedom with one hand whilst continuing to limit their options with the other. There is so much that can be pulled out and examined from this novel, socially, psychologically, and culturally. I thought it was brilliant.
This novel reflects the complexity of families and their hidden inner workings. But most of all, it examines motherhood, the perceptions, the realities, and the human failings of those who hold that much revered and sometimes reviled title.
