Between Two Waves - book synopsis
Following is the synopsis for Between Two Waves - a journey through adult orphanhood.
Narrative nonfiction/memoir
92,000 words
Final Edit
Mentor: Mark Tredinnick
Editor: Katia Ariel
One week after my 19th birthday, in October 1985, my parents and 16-year-old brother, Bill, died in a boating accident on Westernport Bay. It is the cataclysm around which the story of my life revolves. I felt like I had fallen through the world; I was left isolated, lonely, aching all over.
In the months that followed, as early-morning light contoured the elms outside my bedroom window, I lay curled up in foetal position, unable to move for the pain. I lost most of my friends who were young, unable to cope with my loss. My remaining family communicated in pleasantries; our sorrow was held away from each other.
The only way to survive was to bolt my trauma down and get over it. In time I learned to philosophise my experience and believed my grieving done. I assumed the chronic health conditions, anxiety, depression, inability to find belonging were symptomatic of not striving hard enough, not being worthy enough.
But when a new relationship failed 35 years later, my cultivated façade crumbled to expose a cavernous grief that had laid curled in on itself for decades, buried under social norms and desperation to belong. This time the only way to survive was to return to the original grief.
Between Two Waves is a memoir/creative non-fiction that follows my journey into adult orphanhood and the consequence of becoming untethered from family, home, society, safety, and identity. I look to the fictional orphan, an oft-used literary trope, to make sense of my story. I slip under the heavy covers of trauma: back to the room where I was raped weeks after my parents and brother’s deaths; back to the black soundless terror of sibling abuse; into the unrelenting shame of being alone and vulnerable. In search of answers, I turn to neuroscience and learn the physical, psychological and relational consequences of trauma. This is where self-forgiveness begins.
Seneca wrote, ‘…this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife.’ I learn to sit with my grief and let it course its way through my body. It is brutal yet beautiful. It is redolent with love. I discover others on the same journey—Nick Cave, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Gilbert, people I meet in cafes—and their stories travel with me.
I discover pain is its most excruciating at the liminal point of surrender. Once we yield, we are safe and can explore the nature of grief—how we experience it, how we heal. I start swimming at dawn in the bay near my home. I immerse myself in nature—its currents, its waves, its rhythm—and allow it to hold me, instruct me, speak to my grief. Through the weeping violin of Beethoven’s String Quartet No 13, I travel the waves of sorrow and yearning. In the words of Tennyson, Alice Seabold and Rilke, I find redemption. I discover the indigenous philosophy of Dadirri—listening deeply to the deep—and allow it to carry me home.
Between Two Waves is about the redemptive power of being present with our grief, becoming unflinchingly kind to ourselves and opening ourselves to love even when it hurts.