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A Mother's Disgrace
The frank and intimate journey of self-discovery by author, critic and arts commentator Robert Dessaix. Confronting, revealing and candid, the book traces his life from adoption towards the end of World War II, to a most unusual childhood on Sydney's North Shore, to his fascination with Russia and his time spent studying in Cold War Moscow, and to his years spent criss-crossing the globe from Kashmir to Peru on various study trips. But a life that might have been exciting to others, to Robert was empty at its core. Constantly haunting him was the realisation that there was a "shaft of silence" running through his being - the question of who his natural mother was and what his origins were. A story of coming to terms with a new identity.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 27, 2021
A moving and articulate—although at times, a little disjointed—account of identity after adoption and alternative sexuality after 12 years of marriage. On occasion I found Dessaix's turn of phrase a little pompous however, this didn’t stop me from enjoying his memoir and I particularly loved his description of the Russia years:
"It struck me...when I was moving back and forth between Moscow and Canberra, how little scope there is in polite company in Australia for talking without embarrassment about anything too metaphysical—fears and feelings and private philosophies. In Russia I used to feel, perhaps wrongly, that you could turn to the person next to you on a bus and say: ‘What do you think about death, then?’ and get into a very interesting discussion, probably with the whole bus. You couldn’t do that in Australia…In Russia impatience was a style, a way of confronting the world. There you could shout ‘Drivel!’ and ‘Lies!’ and no one sulked or broke off the discussion (p.81) ."
Wouldn’t you love to holler “DRIVEL!” or “LIES!” when the situation required such exclamation? I would!
"It struck me...when I was moving back and forth between Moscow and Canberra, how little scope there is in polite company in Australia for talking without embarrassment about anything too metaphysical—fears and feelings and private philosophies. In Russia I used to feel, perhaps wrongly, that you could turn to the person next to you on a bus and say: ‘What do you think about death, then?’ and get into a very interesting discussion, probably with the whole bus. You couldn’t do that in Australia…In Russia impatience was a style, a way of confronting the world. There you could shout ‘Drivel!’ and ‘Lies!’ and no one sulked or broke off the discussion (p.81) ."
Wouldn’t you love to holler “DRIVEL!” or “LIES!” when the situation required such exclamation? I would!
August 28, 2016
A beautifully observed memoir, in which the author’s successful search for his biological mother serves as a framing device for other discoveries, principally of Russia and of his sexuality.
Dessaix was adopted soon after birth and brought up in lower middle class Sydney as the much-loved only child of an older couple. Having studied Russian for many years, he first went to the Soviet Union in 1966. His chapter (“Mother Russia”) on that and subsequent sojourns is one of the best in the book, full of the desire to belong, to “swim about inside the Russian language with the same ease my friends could… [to] let reason and emotion play freely together the way Russians can” (p.88); and searching comparisons between Russian and Australian ways of being. One example:
Dessaix was adopted soon after birth and brought up in lower middle class Sydney as the much-loved only child of an older couple. Having studied Russian for many years, he first went to the Soviet Union in 1966. His chapter (“Mother Russia”) on that and subsequent sojourns is one of the best in the book, full of the desire to belong, to “swim about inside the Russian language with the same ease my friends could… [to] let reason and emotion play freely together the way Russians can” (p.88); and searching comparisons between Russian and Australian ways of being. One example:
It struck me then, during the late 'sixties and early 'seventies when I was moving back and forth between Moscow and Canberra, how little scope there is in polite company in Australia for talking without embarrassment about anything too metaphysical—fears and feelings and private philosophies. In Russia I used to feel, perhaps wrongly, that you could turn to the person next to you on a bus and say: ‘What do you think about death, then?’ and get into a very interesting discussion, probably with the whole bus. You couldn’t do that in Australia. […] It’s partly my fault—I get so impatient with whatever I think is humbug. In Russia impatience was a style, a way of confronting the world. There you could shout ‘Drivel!’ and ‘Lies!’ and no one sulked or broke off the discussion. (p.81) […] In Russia [conversation is] not a prelude to anything, or just a way of passing the time, or a polite accompaniment to a meal. It’s a time for self-revelation, gossip, passion, argument, negotiation, mockery, sometimes even cruelty. […] I loved it. It was uncompetitive. There were never just two sides. (pp.87-88)Dessaix’s observations of what constitutes masculinity in Australia (in his chapter “Another Disgrace” about his failed marriage and his sexuality) also ring true:
A man was attuned to physical sensations rather than to sensitivities…he was physically hard-working (he built, he rode, he laboured—he was not a dainty clerk or a librarian); he dominated nature by thrusting into it, killing things, turning forest into farmland, building cities, laying railway tracks, flying planes, dousing fires, steering ships across oceans—he didn’t decorate, write commentaries, embroider or colour in; […] and he was a realist, engaging with the world face to face, calling a spade a spade, laying it on the line—he had no patience with metaphysics, fictions, poetic transformations, ironic transgressions—with art, in other words. (pp.148-49)In the end, Dessaix realizes that though he and his mother, Yvonne, had lived “not far from each other in terms of miles,” the worlds they had inhabited were completely different. “In neither world was there ever much money, yet I feel in the world I grew up in there was a plenty and a freedom I can’t regret I had. I’m torn, you see, between regret I can scarcely measure for what happened to Yvonne and no regret at all that my life took the course it did.” (p.192)
June 29, 2015
Short, insightful memoir, beautifully written.
January 26, 2021
I read this book after listening to the author on Conversations. His life intrigued me but in the end I found it quite boring. He is obviously a very clever person but I found the narrative a little too convoluted and contrived. I probably would have preferred a straight chronological account of his life. I finished the book but skim read many sections of it.
Want to Read
August 29, 2014The poet Byron expressed the view that his writing derived from a painful intensification of self and the desire for relief from it. To withdraw himself from himself, to be relieved from what he saw as his "cursed selfishness," this was his sole, his entire, his "sincere motive in scribbling at all." While I find there is some truth in this explanation for the origins of my writing, there is so much more to it; indeed, my own raison d'etre for writing is quite complex. It is a subject I have gone into from time to time throughout my memoir and I feel the need to expatiate on it, to touch the motivational matrix, the explanatory framework, for why and what I am doing occasionally. Writing as I do here may be an escape from self, but it is also a royal road to selfhood. This work also negotiates the relationship between self and community in both the Bahá'í Faith and the many communities other than the Baha'i communities in which I have lived in both Australia and Canada. This exercise in negotiation is also partly a source of the complexity I refer to above. There seem to have been many different impulses at work in these volumes. I say all this by way of a brief comment on some of the writings of Robert Dessaix.
As a teacher of English for over three decades at all levels of the educational process, I came to know of the reading tastes of a good cross-section of the public. The Bible, Shakespeare, most of the major philosophers, sociologists and social scientists were simply not read by the great mass of the public. They never came anywhere near the writings of the greats of history or of their contemporary society. One could go so far as to say that my chances of winning any popularity contest was just about nil. Indeed, it would probably be a bad sign if I did.
Some schools of thought take as one of their basic assumptions that we cannot transcend our experiences. One of the founders of such a school, Ernst von Glasersfeld, put that assumption this way: "knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience." What we make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in. It can be sorted into many parts: things, self, others, and so on. It can and it does change from day to day. But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective and, though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may be like yours, I have no way of knowing how much it is like yours and, if I never meet you, as is the case with most of my readers(assuming I ever have any) I must leave the drawing of parallels to others. The experience and interpretation of language is the place where these parallels are drawn.
This memoir/autobiography could safely be placed within this school of thought. Walt Whitman states in his journal, "There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe, which you can have in your writing but which you do not possess in yourself." If this is true, as I believe it is, the only way to write with a unique and compelling voice is to have—or develop—a unique, compelling personality. Whether I have such a voice or such a personality I must leave to others to decide. I'm not even that sure I would want to be that compelling. Like a snowflake, though, I would be happy to be that unique.
There has been a remarkable rise to prominence of public intellectuals and talk about public intellectuals over the last 20 years or so(1994-2014)in Australia, years I have been working on this autobiography and the first 15 years of a new paradigm of learning and growth in the Bahai community. New ways of thinking about history and the nation, issues and the individual and new kinds of public ethical discourse have been put into circulation. Constructivism and personal construct theory which I mentioned in Parts 1 and 2 of this work has been useful in providing one of many theoretical underpinnings to this autobiography. History and the social sciences, psychology and the humanities as both backgrounds and battleground for the telling of my story. For most people, their lives remain part of the great Australian silence. Not everyone is into writing, although the telling of one's story in one shape or form provides the basis for most conversation.
Constructivism is both an idea and a theory in psychology, an idea that we construct our own worlds rather than having them imposed or determined by outside forces or realities. Our major task as individuals, so goes this thoery, is to put some order, some construction, into the facts of our life. We need to cope with the events on our horizon, the events in our future years, and our behaviour as we anticipate it occuring. We adopt mechanisms to achieve our obectives and these mechanisms establish behavioural grooves. These grooves are like templates which we fit over the realities of our lives. We fit the knowledge we have acquired and are acquiring into these established patterns, into scaffolds of meaning, into regularities that coordinate and arrange our experience. We actively construct our learning rather than passively absorb it. I could go into more detail here and discuss the many aspects of constructivist and developmental psychology and how they fit into this autobiography and I may do so in a later edition. Readers are advised to go to my internet site and read the section on autobiography to follow up on the threads I have introduced here.
There are many perspectives on the subject of the public intellectual as well which I don't want to go into here since the subject is largely a tangent to this work. Robert Dessaix's collection of essays, Speaking their Minds (1998), a series of discussions with public intellectuals based on an earlier ABC radio series from 1996-97 suggests an abundance in public intellectual life. Close to forty individuals get to speak in the book. But the occasion of the series and Dessaix's framing comments are stated throughout, almost obsessively, in the language of crisis. Many would say this has not changed ten years later. Some writers argue that memoir has become the preferred mode of Australian public intellectuals, as a form of reflection and self-reflection driven by a sense of crisis or moral anxiety about the past.
As a teacher of English for over three decades at all levels of the educational process, I came to know of the reading tastes of a good cross-section of the public. The Bible, Shakespeare, most of the major philosophers, sociologists and social scientists were simply not read by the great mass of the public. They never came anywhere near the writings of the greats of history or of their contemporary society. One could go so far as to say that my chances of winning any popularity contest was just about nil. Indeed, it would probably be a bad sign if I did.
Some schools of thought take as one of their basic assumptions that we cannot transcend our experiences. One of the founders of such a school, Ernst von Glasersfeld, put that assumption this way: "knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience." What we make of experience constitutes the only world we consciously live in. It can be sorted into many parts: things, self, others, and so on. It can and it does change from day to day. But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective and, though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may be like yours, I have no way of knowing how much it is like yours and, if I never meet you, as is the case with most of my readers(assuming I ever have any) I must leave the drawing of parallels to others. The experience and interpretation of language is the place where these parallels are drawn.
This memoir/autobiography could safely be placed within this school of thought. Walt Whitman states in his journal, "There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe, which you can have in your writing but which you do not possess in yourself." If this is true, as I believe it is, the only way to write with a unique and compelling voice is to have—or develop—a unique, compelling personality. Whether I have such a voice or such a personality I must leave to others to decide. I'm not even that sure I would want to be that compelling. Like a snowflake, though, I would be happy to be that unique.
There has been a remarkable rise to prominence of public intellectuals and talk about public intellectuals over the last 20 years or so(1994-2014)in Australia, years I have been working on this autobiography and the first 15 years of a new paradigm of learning and growth in the Bahai community. New ways of thinking about history and the nation, issues and the individual and new kinds of public ethical discourse have been put into circulation. Constructivism and personal construct theory which I mentioned in Parts 1 and 2 of this work has been useful in providing one of many theoretical underpinnings to this autobiography. History and the social sciences, psychology and the humanities as both backgrounds and battleground for the telling of my story. For most people, their lives remain part of the great Australian silence. Not everyone is into writing, although the telling of one's story in one shape or form provides the basis for most conversation.
Constructivism is both an idea and a theory in psychology, an idea that we construct our own worlds rather than having them imposed or determined by outside forces or realities. Our major task as individuals, so goes this thoery, is to put some order, some construction, into the facts of our life. We need to cope with the events on our horizon, the events in our future years, and our behaviour as we anticipate it occuring. We adopt mechanisms to achieve our obectives and these mechanisms establish behavioural grooves. These grooves are like templates which we fit over the realities of our lives. We fit the knowledge we have acquired and are acquiring into these established patterns, into scaffolds of meaning, into regularities that coordinate and arrange our experience. We actively construct our learning rather than passively absorb it. I could go into more detail here and discuss the many aspects of constructivist and developmental psychology and how they fit into this autobiography and I may do so in a later edition. Readers are advised to go to my internet site and read the section on autobiography to follow up on the threads I have introduced here.
There are many perspectives on the subject of the public intellectual as well which I don't want to go into here since the subject is largely a tangent to this work. Robert Dessaix's collection of essays, Speaking their Minds (1998), a series of discussions with public intellectuals based on an earlier ABC radio series from 1996-97 suggests an abundance in public intellectual life. Close to forty individuals get to speak in the book. But the occasion of the series and Dessaix's framing comments are stated throughout, almost obsessively, in the language of crisis. Many would say this has not changed ten years later. Some writers argue that memoir has become the preferred mode of Australian public intellectuals, as a form of reflection and self-reflection driven by a sense of crisis or moral anxiety about the past.
February 26, 2018
Robert Dessaix was adopted at birth by a lower-middle class family on Sydney's lower North Shore, growing up in the kind of Protestant neighbourhood where "as you'll no doubt remember, neighbours formed clans, sang songs around each other's pianos...quarrelled and cried on each other's shoulders. Unless, of course, you were Catholic, which was considered in extremely poor taste, like farting in a lift."
A Mother's Disgrace weaves autobiography, internal and external inquiry together with such imperceptible segues that despite the jumps in time and place, at no point do you feel the mannerism of most novels and movies that now rely on the technique for narrative interest. From Gogolian episodes as an exchange student in Soviet Moscow to the technocratic idyll of Canberra, ex-wife to current partner Peter Timms, and the ostinato of ancestry and reunion with his birth-mother that runs through the book, Dessaix writes with warmth, gentleness, humour and, though the book is not a tell-all, openness.
A Mother's Disgrace weaves autobiography, internal and external inquiry together with such imperceptible segues that despite the jumps in time and place, at no point do you feel the mannerism of most novels and movies that now rely on the technique for narrative interest. From Gogolian episodes as an exchange student in Soviet Moscow to the technocratic idyll of Canberra, ex-wife to current partner Peter Timms, and the ostinato of ancestry and reunion with his birth-mother that runs through the book, Dessaix writes with warmth, gentleness, humour and, though the book is not a tell-all, openness.
Read
September 13, 2022Funny how coincidences work - they appear at just the right time and fall neatly in place as if a space were especially made for it. Dessaix may argue that there is no coincidence, how easily we dismiss things as chance/randomness when it may be preordained.
Appropriately, this a book where he explores origins - instead of a person made from the collision of random events, he tries to trace himself back to enduring origins (e.g. family, culture). Overall, I really enjoyed it, Dessaix is an interesting character, and perhaps because of his personal story, he isn't afraid to speak frankly.
This book came to me also at a critical time. It nourishes that sense of firstly, 'things are not obliged to be the way they are or appear to be' and secondly, it can be good & useful to have contradictory POVs and not decide between them. So is this coincidence or preordainment?
Appropriately, this a book where he explores origins - instead of a person made from the collision of random events, he tries to trace himself back to enduring origins (e.g. family, culture). Overall, I really enjoyed it, Dessaix is an interesting character, and perhaps because of his personal story, he isn't afraid to speak frankly.
This book came to me also at a critical time. It nourishes that sense of firstly, 'things are not obliged to be the way they are or appear to be' and secondly, it can be good & useful to have contradictory POVs and not decide between them. So is this coincidence or preordainment?
April 29, 2019
A short enjoyable read dealing with his attempt to make sense of his life,his adoption,his adopted and real mother,his marriage and homosexuality,all told in the clear rich prose you expect from him.I enjoyed his refections on life in the Soviet Union.How long ago those times seem today and how quickly we forget.
June 27, 2017
I love Robert Dessaix, but I would have liked more about his mother and less about his thoughts about living in the USSR and other anecdotes (interesting though they are).
February 7, 2018
"This slim volume ..."
August 20, 2020
Adoption and finding his mother. Depth as always.
January 21, 2021
Audiobook version read beautifully and soulfully by the author.
Read
August 7, 2021Introspective eloquent biography
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 15, 2021
What a bore this was only the part where he meets and talks with his biological mother does it sustain interest. Otherwise a coplete bore and waffle feast of ain't I clever
July 6, 2024
Dessaix Days #2
This geezer bangs on for a while and nothing really grabbed me.
I enjoyed The Night Letters but this one was not my proverbial cup of cha!
This geezer bangs on for a while and nothing really grabbed me.
I enjoyed The Night Letters but this one was not my proverbial cup of cha!
January 26, 2025
Australian author Robert Dessaix unveils his discovery of the story behind his natural mother's identity and growing up in Sydney.
June 6, 2018
An excellent autobiography by an intelligent, but easy to read, writer who exposes his complex character with honesty and remarkable self-understanding.
April 16, 2014
(Bookclub book) Overall I enjoyed this book. Robert's narrative jumped a bit from place to place so a couple of times I thought please get on with it and bring the story together. At times he wrote at length on a topic which didn't seem to relate to the main topics of his adoption & homosexuality, but then at other times he wrote an almost throw away line in regards to these topics. When this happened I wanted him to expand and tell us more.
The word 'disgrace' in the title is a harsh word and in the story I thought it was a recurring theme. The disgrace he thought his natural mother may have for him being a homosexual (which she didn't) and the definite disgrace felt by his natural mother from her (formidable) mother and his disgrace at himself for his marriage failing.
The cycle of disgrace was very sad but regardless Robert appeared to have had a loving and secure upbringing with supportive adoptive parents and a few aunties who nurtured his more artistic sensitive side.
The word 'disgrace' in the title is a harsh word and in the story I thought it was a recurring theme. The disgrace he thought his natural mother may have for him being a homosexual (which she didn't) and the definite disgrace felt by his natural mother from her (formidable) mother and his disgrace at himself for his marriage failing.
The cycle of disgrace was very sad but regardless Robert appeared to have had a loving and secure upbringing with supportive adoptive parents and a few aunties who nurtured his more artistic sensitive side.
August 16, 2015
This was an interesting one. Dessaix had a lot of interesting things to say, many of which resonated with me - particularly his discussions on linguistics and the startling revelations he had regarding the nature of a person versus the way they were nurtured. It was a truly interesting book, and I can see why it's a modern classic; at the same time, there's absolutely no reason why this collection of fascinating essays had to be wrapped up and marketed as a memoir. My book club leader suggested that it was part of a culture of unnecessary memoirs by people who can write and therefore think that they should write their life's story. I'm not sure, but the idea has stuck in my head, so now I pretend that A Mother's Disgrace is a collection of interesting essays, and leave it at that.
May 8, 2011
I loved this very moving story of Robert Dessaix's decision to search for his birth mother, and her response to agree to be found and meet up with him. Such an amazing situation, and a very satisfactory outcome. It is such a descriptive piece of work in relation to how much each individual needs to know their blood relative in order to complete their own sense of who they are and where they have come from.
November 28, 2013
This book offers a rare insight, a little too complex for me, hard to picture the emotions, the motivation, and the end result of self discovery. Robert probably needed to write this book for some closure, although it is hard to say what this will achieve. I did like the ending about coincidences and randomness.
October 31, 2013
A fairly interesting read. Quite enjoyed it, especially his adventures in Moscow, although I found myself not caring very much about his other mother (the book is all about leaving behind his adopted family and finding his birth parents, and the new identity which this brought for him).
June 20, 2015
3.5 stars
April 17, 2015
Beautifully written like all of Robert Dessaix's work, and very moving.
September 21, 2015
Frank, perhaps, intimate, maybe...and a little narcissistic? I suppose all autobiographical works are. However I didn't really see the point of this one.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews