In 1983, Erin Vincent was 14 years old. Like most adolescents, she was beginning to shed her childhood and starting to grow into a more durable, flexible adult skin. But when her parents were killed by a speeding tow truck in western Sydney, she found herself frozen in time, immobilised by shock and disbelief.

In 2020, Gemma Parker was feeling restricted with young children in Adelaide when the world entered lockdown with the pandemic. Her plans to research nihilism and literature in Paris, where she studied in her twenties, were crushed. Instead of travelling, she decided to immerse herself in Nietzsche at home, amid the chaos of family life instead.

Review: Fourteen Ways of Looking – Erin Vincent (Upswell); The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why: Finding Freedom in the Cage – Gemma Parker (Scribner)

New fragmented memoirs by these two Australian writers play with non-linearity to express the turmoil of the soul. One is battered by grief, the other assailed by maternal ambivalence. Although their experiences are very different, conventional modes of storytelling are out of reach for both of them. But each make powerful use of their narratives to convey the distress of an interrupted life.

Erin Vincent’s remarkable new book, Fourteen Ways of Looking, is not an easy read, though as a poetic journey into the deepest recesses of grief, it offers a richly rewarding experience.

A deep dive into the psyche of a woman who was transformed as a girl by the sudden death of her parents, this small, but impactful memoir reflects the shattering of a life. It captures Vincent’s desperate search to make sense of a tragedy that has shaped her for the last 43 years.

The accident killed her mother instantly, while her father survived for a month before succumbing to his injuries. In the aftermath, Vincent, together with her three year-old brother and 17-year-old sister, was inexplicably deserted by extended family and friends and left to fend for herself. Emotionally bereft, struggling to comprehend her new reality, she resolved to forge ahead, no matter what.

“At fourteen, I decided I would be hard as a stone and burn bright as the sun,” she writes. “I decided the show must go on.”

She wore a hot pink dress to her mother’s funeral, did a deal with God, and returned to school a week later. Nevertheless, for all her defiance and determination, she was still a child.

Confused, frightened and vulnerable, she wanted to be held, but “could not bear to be touched”. She stopped eating, hid her tears, became convinced her little brother would die next, and........

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