(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
If you’ve read even one book in what could loosely but quite accurately be called the Cosy Redemption genre, in which a person whose life is way less wondrously good than it could be finds healing and a second chance, you will be well aware that the protagonists are usually flawed but not too egregiously so.
They might be whimsical or idiosyncratic or delightfully oddball and strange, or simply not a part of the cisgender, neurotypical mainstream, but they are rarely the kind of character who makes you shake your head or writhe in discomfort at how unnervingly, fallibly human they are.
The really good writers, and there are a number in the field, do imbue their lead characters with appealing fallibility but it’s rare to have a protagonist, such as the one in the Sydney, Australia-set The Little Clothes, who is as brilliantly broken and yet so relatably one of us.
Audrey Mendes is, on paper, at least, absolutely winning at life.
She’s a hard-working lawyer in a firm where her work is routinely the influencing factor in how successfully a case is prosecuted, she is liked, if quite indifferently and with more than a little casual cruelty at times, by her colleagues, and she has a home that she shares her beloved pet rabbit Joni.
Many boxes ticked, and while she is yet to find the man of her dreams, her life is, by any reasonable commonly-accepted metric, a SUCCESS.
‘Calm down, Audrey. Or come back when you are calm. And make an appointment next time. I’m busy and cannot anticipate or attend to your every grievance.’
‘What do you mean by that? I never complain.’
‘I wouldn’t say never.’
Hooray for Audrey then!
But behind all the clever legal thinking and social outings with bestie Maggie and weekly trivia outings with her bunch of pub friends, the good ship Audrey has sprung more than a few existential leaks.
She is yet to make partner, despite being demonstrably better at her job than many of her male counterparts, her mother, Rita, is relentlessly judgemental if indirectly, possibly, maybe, loving (thank god for her gorgeously lovely dad then!) and she is buying very expensive baby clothes, not for friends or relatives but for herself when she’s about as far from pregnant, or any plans to become so, that you can get.
Audrey is, by quite a few measures, a mess of a human being, and while there are times when you cringe mightily on her behalf or worry about damning consequences raining down upon her, she fills The Little Clothes with a wonderfully flawed groundedness that makes her one of the most real protagonists you will ever encounter in the, it must be stated, quite unofficial, Cosy Redemption genre.
She’s suffering from a definite case of arrested growing-up syndrome, and much of the narrative of Cosy Redemption genre is filled with what author Imbi Neeme calls, in her backcover praise-heavy blurb, “a coming-of-middle-age story”.
While much of The Little Clothes is whimsically and often uncomfortably funny, sometimes haha, sometimes most definitely not, it also has a very serious spine running down it as Audrey slowly rediscovers the reason why she has excelled career-wise but is stuck somewhere in the emotional wilds of teenagedom.
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
It’s as this more serious element unfolds, which is relayed graphically and honestly and yet empathetically and with affecting nuance, that all of the strange things Audrey does suddenly make sense.
Or begin to, anyway.
You begin to appreciate right as Audrey does that her compliance with some very unhealthy emotional and sociological dynamics, and her willingness to put up with some terrible behavioural negatives by her similarly stuck mother, aren’t recent developments but the product of decades of repressed trauma, the kind that you don’t deal with because looking it straight in the eye is just too horrific for words.
It’s the kind of long-buried truth whose embrace reminds you that your childhood and teenage life was not the picture-perfect journey it was supposed to be, and it makes sense that Audrey, like many of us, would shove it right to the back of the metaphorical cupboard and simply, self-preservationally pretend it never happened.
The way in which Callaghan brings forth this PTSD-laced trauma is impressively thoughtful and caring, and while it is dark, very dark at times, it is situated in Audrey’s current reality so perfectly well that it’s unveiling, while confronting, also sheds some narrative-propelling light on who Audrey is and why it is her personal life doesn’t quite match the giddy, if stymied, heights of her professional accomplishments.
As long-dismissed secrets being dug up goes, The Little Clothes comes with real heart and presence and a truthfulness which shocks but also embraces with understanding.
‘Who’s the rainmaker now?’ she thought as she staggered through the Wynyward bypass to the ferry wharf, her clothes sticking to her skin, her face scabbed and her heart light. Audrey knew no one was looking.
So, while Audrey is driving away without paying for petrol and rebelling in a thousand other ways that challenge a world which fails to reward her for playing by its contrary and wilfully inconsistent rules, she’s doing so because somewhere deep down, and then not so deep down at all, her psyche is awakening to how badly broken she is, and how much she needs to find herself and her place in the world, untouched by the dead hand of life-enervating trauma.
What makes Callaghan wholly thoughtful treatment of Audrey coming alive in small and then some very big and loud ways resonate so much is that the protagonist of The Little Clothes feels so damn real.
She might be the darling of the legal world – it’s not recognised at all but she is – and winning at some superficially material aspects of life, but she’s terribly sad and flawed and much of what drives The Little Clothes and makes it so incredibly affecting, for all its oddball, cringey moments, is what happens when the past meets the present and a reckoning must be had.
A reckoning that has the potential, which Callaghan realises with a brilliantly written, often uncomfortable truthfulness, to reshape Audrey’s life, and give her a place in life which is undeniably and authentically hers and which isn’t the product of a person desperately, if unknowingly, hiding from their past, but someone embracing all its possibilities from a far more healed and knowing perspective.
The Little Clothes is a delight, and while it is, as the back cover blurb says “humourous and provocative”, it is also reassuringly and freeingly human, a story which draws us into the world of a broken but possible person and watches as they stumble, and then run, into a new world full of healing, hope and a pronounced lack of unnecessary baby clothes.