Fiona Kelly McGregor

Fiona Kelly McGregor is, according to her website a cross-disciplinary author, artist and critic who writes novels, essays, articles and reviews. Some readers will know her as a performance artist, but most notably as the author of Indelible Ink (2010) which won the Age Book of the Year. (See my review.) Her previous fiction also includes Strange Museums (2008); Chemical Palace (2002); Suck My Toes (1994), short stories re-issued by Scribe as the ebook Dirt (2013) along with the novel Au Pair (1993) which I read and enjoyed before I started this blog or (alas) even a reading journal. She was named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists in 1997.

Mcgregor's website tells me that this new novel Iris, is the first in a duet of novels based on the life of real-life Iris Webber:

a petty criminal active in Sydney’s sly-grog underworld from the 1930s-1950s. Set 1932-37, Iris is an epic and picaresque ride through inner-city slums; a doomed love story peopled with scammers, gangsters and thieves. It’s an interrogation of how society criminalises its most marginalised people.

So the 448 pages that I've just read is but the first instalment of prodigious research for McGregor's doctoral thesis!

(Mercifully) the novel doesn't read like a thesis. Written in a profusion of short vivid sentences, peppered with (a-hem) lively language and authentic slang of the era, it tells the story of a woman who was a survivor, but whose survival was always only tentative. And while Iris comes across as a woman determined to be in charge of her life, I came to the end of the novel feeling melancholy because her life was so compromised by crime as a solution to extreme poverty. She and her friends were constantly in and out of gaol for both petty crime and on remand for more serious crimes, and the 'Refty' was a brutal place. A very brutal place, where Iris was often cold, hungry, and recovering without medical attention for the beatings that had been dished out to her.

In a life characterised by insecurity in all the things that matter (shelter, income, safety, dignity) it was the insecurity of her friendships that seemed most tragic to me.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/12/21/iris-2022-by-fiona-kelly-mcgregor/… (mehr)

Fiona McGregor's writing seems to be very place-oriented, and in this work the place is largely Paris, as seen from her Australian perspective. Having an Australian perspective myself, I related well to this. This is also a story about family relationships, the narrator's own and the family for whom she works as an au pair. I enjoyed McGregor's observations of family life, especially the narrator's own. I did find the French family a little perplexing, in particular the child's behaviour. I think Ms McGregor is trying to show us that family dysfunction can take many forms. Having recently read a later work by the same author I can see that she has matured in the past 20 years (as one would hope!) but there is an underlying element in both her early and late work which attracts me to her reading: her observation of the power of small elements of interaction in relationships.… (mehr)

This book is excellent. And I say that having approached it with the expectation that I probably wouldn't like it at all. I saw it on the library shelf and read the publisher-elicited quotes by well known Australian authors on the cover and thought "yeah, right". Then I read the blurb, and thought "Hmmm...sounds like I could relate to these characters (Marie King is 59 . . . has lived a rather conventional life on Sydney's affluent north shore..)". And indeed I did relate to the characters and their situations, even to the point that the main character is referred to a doctor who is obviously based on a real doctor - mine! She finds she has cancer (as I have also found), has pet issues (yep), property issues, Sydney climate issues, one gay child (me too). Those connections made the book especially interesting to me, but even aside from that I reckon this is a quality piece of writing that anyone could find to be a cut above the average. Actually, my only criticism is that it reads a little too much as a book directed to Sydney-siders. It has references to places that would be obscure to non-Sydney people, and acronyms that non-Sydney people would need to Google to understand. I'm not sure whether the average reader might find these references a little too impenetrable and with a relevance that is completely lost. That said, however, I have no hesitation in giving it 5 stars and looking for more work by this author.… (mehr)