an aha moment

Scrolling through pics of MD on google, searching for a rare one I may have misssed

 I ask

is it that...

MD is the writer I wished my mother could be?

perhaps
instead

I was having that wish for me

                                                Jan & Marj 1979. Photo: Ruth Maddison

another AHA

Marry quotes from MD or writings re MD with memoir pieces about Marj et moi

The similarities - school teacher parents, moving house often, crazy mothers, illness, manic depression, lower middle class- emotional poverty, landscape, rivers - Mekong, Murray, Goulburn, and more.
The opposites also, the ways their/our lives were not similar.
Melancholy as the main thread...

so I go quote searching...

'It happened every day. Of that I'm sure. It must have come on quite sudeenly. At a given moment every day the despair would make its appearance. And then would follow an inabilitry to go on. or sleep, or sometimes nothing, or sometimes instead the buying of houses, the removals or sometimes the moodiness, just the moodiness, the dejection... or else nothing, or else, just sleep, die.' (MD.The Lover 18).

From Laure Adler  in  her biography -  Marguerite Duras,  A Life.

'When Marguerite was six months old her mother became so ill that the military doctors in Saigon had her urgently rushed back to France. She was suffering from 'compound arthtritis, malaria, heart problems and renal complications' She returned to Saigon on June 14, 1915. Baby Marguerite had been separated from her mother for eight months and in the care of a Vietnamese boy.'


"Marguerites's early childhood could be summed up as along and restless wander through Indochina's main towns. No memeorable house, no lasting friendships, no school either: the mother taught this hardworking child, whose particular loves were reading and writing, unlike the two brothers who were already rebelling against any attempt at education'

Maybe not even such literal similarities.. perhaps just suggestions.

and then there's quotes from Sylvia

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar  

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 


(So after saying I would do an hour per weekday I have already spent most of the day back in MMD land. That's what usually happens, once I get going I never want to stop. Good work JC!).