Debra Adelaide’s new novel, When I Am Sixty-Four, is based on her lifelong friendship with the late Gabrielle Carey – a fellow author she first met in primary school, and bonded with over reading. Best known as the teenage author of Puberty Blues, Carey was also a lifelong literary scholar – particularly of James Joyce.

Adelaide has published novels and short-story collections since the mid-1990s and has won or been listed for significant literary awards. I was pleased – though also wary – to be invited to review this work of autofiction (a kind of fictionalised autobiography).

Review: When I Am Sixty-Four – Debra Adelaide (UQP)

Its focus is an account – no doubt partially true and partially invented – of her friend’s long mental illness, and her decision to end her life in 2023 at the age of 64, the age Carey’s own father had died by suicide.

I suspect the use of autofiction achieves, for author and reader, a double relationship with both the text itself and the reality of Carey’s death. It reports directly on real-life tragedy; but because it is difficult or impossible for readers to know what is true or imagined, a gap emerges in the reality.

This gap, arguably, provides Carey with a degree of privacy and readers with a sense of the generalised sorrow of such a loss – but without picking over the bones of someone else’s life, and death.

The book opens with the narrator visiting her friend’s house to find her still in bed, “the quilt smooth over the tiny lozenge of her frame”. This elegant description softens the impact of the spectre of her death, which haunts the margins even of the first page. So, though it opens with illness and loss, the story manages to avoid an overwhelming sense of gloom.

It achieves this, I think, through the often exquisite use of language, in a tone that seems to express sorrow, but no real fear, in the face of death. This book is, after all, written by the author of The Household Guide to Dying, a novel that........

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