Susan Johnson struggled to complete Aphrodite’s Breath but in loss, she found a deeper truth.

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There was a time when Susan Johnson didn’t think she would be able to finish her book, Aphrodite’s Breath. She was “capsized”. The person who had been central to her life, and the book, was gone. “I was just completely wrecked.”

She tried to work out if she could give the money back to the publisher, but realised she would have to give an Australia Council grant back too. “I just didn’t have enough money to do that.” Left without a choice and a book that had drastically and painfully veered off its intended course, it became something else, something with a different kind of “artistic logic”.

Susan Johnson: “There was a whole lot of mystery at the heart of Mum.”Credit: Tony Maniaty

In fact, it became loaded with meaning and revelatory hindsight. Finished in a state of grief after the death of her mother, Aphrodite’s Breath is raw, brave, beautiful and with an emotional truth, Johnson knows, “it mightn’t otherwise have had”.

It is a journey outwards to a Greek island and inwards to all the maddening, complicated, ambivalent, inescapable love between a mother and an adult daughter all magnified by being in a foreign place that would reveal who each of them really was. Now, though, Johnson wonders now if she ever fully knew her mother. “There was a whole lot of mystery at the heart of Mum,” she says. “There’s no way I could have sat down and had a full and frank discussion with Mum.”

When she was a young woman Johnson had experienced something close to rapture on the island of Kythera where she had spent several months. “Everything was luminous,” she writes, the sea was “an exultant blue”, she fell “fatally and irrevocably in love with Kythera.” In the intervening years she had been “a wanderer in many lands”, writing her books, living in Hong Kong, France, and a decade in London. But for nine years she had been marooned in Brisbane, working as journalist as the sole breadwinner for her two sons, getting up at five in the morning to write her novels The Landing and From Where I Fell.

Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson

As soon as her sons left home, so did she, with her mother in tow. “I did realise in retrospect that part of it was not wanting to face the empty nest, definitely.” But she couldn’t leave her mother and in a reckless moment asked her to go and live with her in Greece. Yes, her mother said: “I’ll be close to heaven if my time is up”.

“Doesn’t that sound like fun,” a former lover is reported to have remarked. “Mamma Mia meets Apocalypse Now.”

When Susan and Barbara Johnson left for Greece she was 62 and her mother was 85, “brave and foolish in equal measure”, she writes. “We went forth blazing, as if nothing could fell us.” Now, she says, “neither of us thought she was going to die. We didn’t even think she would get sick.”

For Johnson the rapture was still there. “There’s a physical joy and grace that comes over me when I’m in Greece. There is nothing quite like it, you are completely unwrapped in Greece, it does something to you, it’s very elemental in a way that other places aren’t.”

But not for Barbara. They arrived in winter, she was always cold. “She was not prepared for it. I would go on a vigorous walk, seven or 10 kilometres, she wasn’t doing that.” The house they had rented didn’t suit her. While Johnson joyously greeted their new Greek life, “my mother went to Greece to watch Netflix.”

Susan Johnson and her mother on Kythera, 2019.

Johnson began to realise, she says now, “that she wasn’t fully engaging and that she wasn’t curious about the world in the same way I was. It was quite a shock to me to realise that mum didn’t have the same sense of openness.”

Barbara just wanted to go home: “I believed that somehow I had failed her,” Johnson writes. Johnson would immerse herself in Kythera, finding beauty “in all its moods, in its glories and failures”. Joining the olive harvest, learning Greek, rebuilding herself, writing a journal that would become the backbone of the book.

She found deep friendships, sitting by a fire in winter listening to stories. “A lot of Greeks are still great storytellers. A lot of the myths were oral … There is still a folklore culture in Kythera, and the stories are enthralling.”

Susan Johnson is a writer with every fibre of her being. She subscribes to the Saul Bellow rule that the name of the game is to “Give All”. “It’s emotional,” she says, “even physical. You’ve got to have stamina and mental energy.” And, she writes, “creating a book colonised my intellectual and emotional life, filling my dreaming as well as my waking moments.”

With nine novels and three works of non-fiction over 30 years, she knows only too well the vicissitudes, the gamble of a writing life. After early success with Messages From Chaos and Flying Lessons, one year she earned $6000, another year there was a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster in New York in a two-book deal for A Better Woman and Hungry Ghosts.

Through all the highs and lows she says she still writes, because “it is how I understand and interpret the world. It’s about posing the questions about existence and all these mysterious things that happen to you as you pass through a lifetime. It is about trying to find some meaning out of the chaos of life in some way. How people are shaped by life and experience. I think that is why I write.”

Now, Johnson says, writing the book “was incredibly difficult”.

“It was my mother and I didn’t want to betray her, so I had to try to find a really fine line with putting something that was truthful and that actually conveyed what happened to us. I had to protect her reputation. But I also wanted to have enough truth and authenticity in it. It was very difficult to straddle those two opposing things.”

But Barbara Johnson’s great gift to her daughter was this book, agreeing to be part of it, knowing the risks of travelling with a writer, inadvertently being the catalyst for this writing from the heart. In the book Johnson writes, “if I had known that those weeks and months were to be my mother’s final days, I would have kept holding her hand and never left her side once”.

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