'As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck, and her happy, loving family fell apart.
'This heartbreaking memoir asks what happens to those who are left behind when someone takes their own life. It’s about the importance of home, family and forgiveness—and finding peace in a place of pain.
'By the critically acclaimed author of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: To all those left behind
'For the longest time, the Australia I knew was all myth. Early reading didn’t dispel this languid stereotype because part of that upbringing was made possible only by the claustrophobia of the culture itself. It was a narrow existence, filled with outback hardship or romance novels, bush memoirs (how embarrassing that I appear to have done the same thing) and writers from America or worse, England. In short, the authors I knew were not a representative sample of this country. This is not a problem if your range is bigger and broader, but to the extent that my range left my cultural Umwelt at all, it stopped at Not Without My Daughter. Life, then, is about pushing back the borders of our observable universe. Especially when such a quest reveals much about the place we call home.' (Introduction)
'‘Books talk among themselves’, Umberto Eco (1984: 61) once quipped convincingly. Readers overhear those conversations, I assert. Some books sing to you (as Francesca Rendle-Short, in her performative essay on memoir in Offshoot, says of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race [232]). Offshoot crackles at me. Staying ululates.' (Introduction)
'When my mind returns to Jessie Cole’s grief memoir Staying, her third book after the novels Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, my thoughts flood with a lush green. It returns often, to the secluded Eden in northern New South Wales where Jessie and her baby brother, Jake, are born. Built by hippie parents searching for a different life, their haphazard house doesn’t intrude on the surrounding forest but evolves symbiotically, limbs tenderly entwined. “We all grew together, from nothing much to something,” writes Cole.' (Introduction)
'For the longest time, the Australia I knew was all myth. Early reading didn’t dispel this languid stereotype because part of that upbringing was made possible only by the claustrophobia of the culture itself. It was a narrow existence, filled with outback hardship or romance novels, bush memoirs (how embarrassing that I appear to have done the same thing) and writers from America or worse, England. In short, the authors I knew were not a representative sample of this country. This is not a problem if your range is bigger and broader, but to the extent that my range left my cultural Umwelt at all, it stopped at Not Without My Daughter. Life, then, is about pushing back the borders of our observable universe. Especially when such a quest reveals much about the place we call home.' (Introduction)
'When my mind returns to Jessie Cole’s grief memoir Staying, her third book after the novels Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, my thoughts flood with a lush green. It returns often, to the secluded Eden in northern New South Wales where Jessie and her baby brother, Jake, are born. Built by hippie parents searching for a different life, their haphazard house doesn’t intrude on the surrounding forest but evolves symbiotically, limbs tenderly entwined. “We all grew together, from nothing much to something,” writes Cole.' (Introduction)
'‘Books talk among themselves’, Umberto Eco (1984: 61) once quipped convincingly. Readers overhear those conversations, I assert. Some books sing to you (as Francesca Rendle-Short, in her performative essay on memoir in Offshoot, says of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race [232]). Offshoot crackles at me. Staying ululates.' (Introduction)
