(courtesy IMP Awards)
We all know growing up is tough.
But for some people growing up is even tougher, with a bewildering array of issues to navigate and circumstances to survive, and no real emotional support to get through it all.
Just how daunting it can be is explored with rich empathy and a a strikingly affecting emotionalism in Toni Jordan’s novel, Tenderfoot, which centres on Andie Tanner, a Brisbane-based girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager in 1975 who is relatively happy in her little corner of the world.
Sure her mum is emotionally unpredictable, driven by insecurity and large chips on her elegant shoulders, angry at her husband, the universe and an aching sense that she deserves far better than life is serving up, but she adores her dad, loves the greyhounds he races with middling success at nearby tracks and is determined to grow up and follow in his footsteps.
In Andie’s small pocket of the world, everything is certain, complete and easy to understand and with the certainty borne of being someone who has yet to wise up to how real life can be, can’t see that changing.
But then change it does and in ways that rock Andie’s once stable world to the core, shaking all of the things she relied on to buttress and protect her against her mother’s lighting fast mood changes and her mocking approach to raising a daughter which contains as much vitriol as it does love.
If only I could make it home to the dogs. The dogs were the keepers of my secrets, the balm for all my worries. They made everything better. They were courageous, unstoppable, they always finished every race, even when they were sore, even when they were injured. Together, the dogs and I would come up with a plan to get Larissa back, to restore everything to the way it should be.
What really affects you as you read this luminously poetic and emotionall grounded novel is how brutal a transition this is for Andie, who is fiercely intelligent and who learns to get through a life without a constantly present father, any real friends at school and a sense that home is some kind of sanctuary (which it most manifestly is not).
Driven still by the certainties which have long framed her world – policemen are good, her dad is unfallible and being good at school matters more than anything – Andie navigates her vastly changed realities in Tenderfoot with a growing sense that perhaps it’s time to realise that life doesn’t always play out the way you think it will.
It’s a tough lesson for anyone to learn, and much of what drives Tenderfoot is watching with aching familiarity as Andie discovers that childlike perspective of the world at large is rapidly nearing its use-by date.
Coloured by rememberances of a now 60-something Andie, who provides commentary on the events of her youth and who notes, rather ruefully, how naive she was and how that often came back to bite her, Tenderfoot is a wondrous joy that also provides more than a few jolts of familiarity to anyone, and it’s pretty much all of us, who has suddenly realised that all of the hopes, expectations and certainties that drove their childhoods start coming apart as teenage life encroaches and you start hurtling towards adulthood, ready or not.
(courtesy Text Publishing)
It’s striking just how much you come to identify with and love Andie.
She is all of us; many of us may not have had to get up and over the slew of obstacles that dog her and turn growing up into a challenging set of circumstances with only faint traces of the wonder and innocent vigour of childhood, but we can all relate to how Andie goes from believing without swerving in how life is safe and secure and has predicactable outcomes to coming to understand, with a brutally emotional jolt, that all she can rely on is that many of the things she naively believed in are in fact smoke and mirrors with little to no substance.
The adult Andie of Tenderfoot, who doesn’t enter the narrative proper, leaving the story to her younger, more innocent self, ruefully remarks more than once on what it felt like to realise her dad wasn’t perfect, her deeply flawed and emotionally scarred mum is more complex that young Andie realised, and that her life may head down vocational routes far from the greyhound-centric one she imagined.
Told with deep compassion and thoughtful empathy that wraps itself around your heart and doesn’t let go, Tenderfoot beautifully encapsulates how disruptive the process of growing up can be, epecially when it turns out that her understanding of the world has been twisted by the unquestioning acceptance of half-truths, secrets she knew nothing about and lives lived by her parents which bore little resemblance tp what young Andie thought they were.
My parents were as shocked as I was. I had never seen either of them cry, and the fact that I wasn’t a sook, not even at the dentist or when being vaccinated, was a source of parental pride. Now I understand that they had trained me into never crying by making a fuss of my bravery since I was a toddler, until it was part of the way I saw myself. Right at that moment, though, there was nothing I could do.
Reading Tenderfoot, which is moving on so many levels and in so many ways, it strikes you again and again just how much coming of age is not some rich and wafty warmhearted tale, though that cna be part of the experience, but a series of aching bumps and bruises as realisations about the truth state of the world and life suddenly hit you without warning.
Every time Andie remarks on how she got this wrong or got that wrond, and how it chipped away at her childhood sense of self, you feel something shift inside you, all too aware that growing up becomes less about certainties and truths as you enter the teenage years and beyond and more about how you can really expect anything to believe as you thought it might.
This reviewer grew up bullied and trammelled by peers and adults alike, and yet somehow still thought that natural justice and the rightness of things would even the balance and see the darkness replaced by some kind of restorative light.
Realising that that is not going to happen, or at least in the way you thought it would, is sobering in the extreme, and much of what makes Tenderfoot sing and soar and steal in your heart is how Andie deals with the shattering of childhood assumptions and safety, and a finds a way through that may not resemble anything she once expected but which speaks to how often you can survive and thrive after the sands of life dramatically shift beneath your feet.