Issue Details: First known date: 2025... 2025 Shelf Life : Secrets of the Interior
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'IN 1978 I launched a tactical raid of sorts in my parents’ walk-in wardrobe. This was out of character for me – until this moment the idea that they had secrets I wished to plumb or, as I might later describe it, a private life, was not just a matter of total indifference, it was inconceivable. I was surreptitiously trying on my father’s leather jacket while he was at work and noticed that the louvred cabinet standing between the open racks of rayon sundresses and wide-lapelled suits was secured by a small brass padlock. As it happened, the cabinet proved laughably insecure; the tiny key was in a glass pin dish poking out from beneath the shoe stand. On opening the lock, I found precisely what a fourteen-year-old would wish most to find behind a moderately defended door.' 

(Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Griffith Review no. 87 February 2025 29689883 2025 periodical issue

    'Sometimes, If I can't get to sleep, I imagine I'm back in the house where I grew up. ('Grew up' is probably a stretch - we lived there for nearly seven years, beginning when I was eight, but it was the longest we'd lived anywhere and when the time finally came, I found it hard to countenance the idea of leaving.) It was an old cottage on a hill in south-east England, and it had creaking floorboards, beamed ceilings and a long, unruly garden. There'd been a death upstairs the year before we moved in - one of the previous owners had had cancer and passed away in the master bedroom, surrounded by his family - but it was a peaceful house, and at well over a hundred years old must have witnessed more than one life reach its end. I like to go back there in my mind's eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.' (Publication summary)

    2025
    pg. 98 - 105
Last amended 4 Mar 2025 16:22:07
98 - 105 Shelf Life : Secrets of the Interiorsmall AustLit logo Griffith Review
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