The Lost Woman - a powerful memoir

‘The Lost Woman is a powerful memoir about a daughter’s escape, through hope and 

storytelling, from the control of her quietly malignant family.’ Brenda Walker 

I came home from school on a wet autumn afternoon to find the door locked. Mother’s face

appeared at the window, then vanished. I knocked on the door. ‘Let me in. Let me in.’ But Mother wouldn’t let me in. The rain fell harder. I shivered inside my green jacket. ‘Mummy, let me in.’ I knocked and knocked; I tried the door in case it had unlocked itself since the last time I tried. Finally, I sat on the damp step. Every now and then I glanced up to see her face at the window.As soon as I did she whipped out of sight. I waited all afternoon until it was dark. Then, just before my father came home, Mother opened the door and hurried me inside.

When Sydney Smith was nine, she thought about killing herself because of her mother’s cruelty. When she reached puberty, her mother sexually assaulted her—a pattern repeated over the years.

By the time Sydney was twenty, she believed there were cameras behind every mirror in the house, that her mother could read her mind, that anybody who looked at her could see the bloody fantasies of murder and mutilation which tormented her.

How to escape? How to survive?

Enthralling and disturbing, brave and elegantly written, The Lost Woman is that rare memoir: a story which, once read, will never be forgotten. 

‘Be as brave as Smith, take this story on.

 If it surprises in how much damage we can wreak just

 in the domestic sphere – it may surprise even more 

how far we can come in our return from that.’ 

Fiona McGregor

Sydney Smith  was born and grew up in Wellington, New Zealand, the daughter of a Maori mother and pakeha father. She moved to Australia when she was twenty-five and has lived here ever since. She is a past winner of the Age Short Story Competition, and her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the Age, Griffith REVIEW, Island, Imago and the New England Review. Sydney founded and co-ordinates the Victorian Mentoring Service for Writers. 

This is her first book.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

‘In my youth, I tried to write about my mother in a way that would put her into perspective. This didn’t happen. She consumed me, my rage consumed me, and after a few fraught attempts, I gave up. 

A few years ago, I tried again to write about her, this time in essay form. It was difficult at first; the prohibition against saying anything overshadowed all my efforts. At last I learned how to sneak up on her: I would begin by writing an essay about some other subject, such as reality TV or my father, and get around the prohibition that way. Soon, the feeling that I must not say anything about her subsided. I knew I wanted to write a book-length work about her, and then it was only a matter of finding the right way to do this, the right gate through which to enter my story about Mother and me. I had for some years wanted to write about my childhood desire to kill myself to escape the problem of my mother. Then one day I sat down and wrote an essay about the day, when I was nine, that I decided to do it, and what happened. Once I had written that, the rest of the book came naturally.

But this account leaves out so much that is oppressive and troubling. A writer of memoir is in a position of great power: their version of events becomes the definitive version, the unchallenged version. I am the only writer in my family. How can I assert myself in this way and, by doing so, deprive my brothers of their voices? I dread being like Mother, when she deprived my brothers and me of any voice, any power to decide our lives for ourselves, when her perception governed our family for many years, and perhaps still does. But if I say nothing, then her perception continues to hold sway. By saying nothing, I allow her complete control.

The hardest thing about writing it was having to spend hour upon hour, day after day, month after month, remembering how I used to be and my mother’s crushing effect. But I needed to do it. I needed to honour the girl I used to be. I rejected her when I changed my name. I had to show her that I don’t reject her anymore. She is still part of me. She has tagged along behind me through this long journey away from Mother and into another way of being. This memoir is for her. It’s also for my mother, who suffered some personal blow so harsh that she retreated into illness as if it would shelter and protect her. Some members of my family believe she’s evil. How can anyone so helpless and fragile, so rejected by all the people she cares about, so bound by her own mental infirmity, be evil? Finally, what I aimed to do in my memoir is reduce the grandiose notion of evil to the frail and human. She had a destructive influence on every life that came into her orbit. But in the end, it’s what we do about it, how we meet that influence, how we deflect it, how we struggle to understand her, or avoid that struggle: this is what matters.’ 

Sydney Smith, 2012

Text Publishing  AU$32.95/ NZ$40 C-format paperback & e-book