Hiding Places
By Lynley Edmeades
Review by Rosa
Hiding Places is a clever combination of some of my favourite elements to devour in word form: the confining expectations of womanhood, the passing of time, and an experimental form that takes just as much puzzling as the “story” itself. Within this beautifully bizarre book, Lynley Edmeades fictionalises her experience of becoming a mother in bite-size vignettes, underpinned by the framework of the 1913 Plunket manual, Feeding and Care of Baby by Frederic Truby King. She flickers between historical excerpts, intertextual references, and correspondence with her loved ones and the writer-mother she obsesses over. These are peppered with redacted text, anonymised characters, concertinaed perspectives and timelines that simultaneously complement and agitate each other.
All this sounds bewilderingly sporadic and avant-garde, yet it’s a joy to read and the calculated effect is brilliant. Every word demonstrates Edmeades’ refusal for her work as a writer AND mother to be critically compartmentalised, and her rejection of the idea that parents are incapable of doing both, and doing both well. Multiple things can be true at once. It is often impossible to fit the fragments together cleanly, but I loved the ‘mess’ and mind-boggle of it all.
While I had to hide Hiding Places from myself for the benefit of my final exam slog, I encourage everyone to seek it out as soon as possible. It was a pleasure to pick up, put down and mull over, and it made my brain implode in the best way: with a desire to read, write, and keep digging. For fans of Deborah Levy, Emilie Pine, Kate Zambreno and Rachel Cusk.
