After her first book was published to acclaim, journalist Megan K. Stack got pregnant and quit her job to write. She pictured herself pen in hand while the baby napped, but instead found herself traumatised by a difficult birth and shell-shocked by the start of motherhood.

Living abroad provided her with access to affordable domestic labour, and, sure enough, hiring a nanny gave her back the ability to work. At first, Megan thought she had little in common with the women she hired. They were important to her because they made her free. She wanted them to be happy, but she didn’t want to know the details of their lives. That didn’t work for long.

When Pooja, an Indian nanny who had been absorbed into the family, disappeared one night with no explanation, Megan was forced to confront the truth: these women were not replaceable, and her life had become inextricably intertwined with theirs. She set off on a journey to find out where they really come from and understand the global and personal implications of wages paid, services received, and emotional boundaries drawn in the home.

Women’s Work by Megan K. Stack is a memoir about raising children abroad, and the relationship that Megan forms with her hired help — Xiao Li, Pooja and Mary.

I identified many issues with the work. Megan is incredibly naive and at times snobby, and her husband Tom really doesn’t come off well. I’m surprised they’re still married, and Megan never seems to confront his role in their relationship and their family. Tom doesn’t help, and he doesn’t even try to help. He’s lazy and judgemental, and makes no effort to understand how much work goes on at home to look after the children. And…..Megan lets it happen. It’s like she doesn’t even care to notice. Her entire book is about the role of women in taking care of children, and rarely does she seem to confront the role of the husband and father in her household, and how he’s not aiding the situation?

“On Sunday Tom discovered that hanging out with tiny children was not a sun-washed field and overflowing picnic basket, but a jumble of physical needs and messy rooms and senseless tears. On Sunday I discovered that my partner didn’t know where the diapers were kept and thought it prudent to let crusty dishes fester in the sink because a ‘maid’ would arrive twenty-four hours later.”

I found the structure of the book quite problematic. Megan is talking about these WOC who help her raise her kids — the fact she has more than one WOC helping her in India should give you an indication of their level of wealth in the countries they’re living in — and while she’s trying to articulate her experiences with them and their role in her family, what she’s really doing is attempting to capture their journey and their life struggles but it’s from her own perspective. And her perspective is skewed. She’s a privileged, rich white woman. What could she possibly understand about these women and their struggles?

To give you an example, she hires Pooja in India to help with the family responsibilities. At first, Pooja is responsible for the cooking, but then afterwards, Pooja takes on more responsibilities looking after the kids. After a while, Pooja develops a drinking problem and becomes irresponsible around the kids. Megan fires her. We learn later that Pooja’s husband was incredibly abusive towards her — physically and emotionally — and no one helped Pooja when he physically attacked her. She got pregnant and performed a self-induced abortion in Megan’s house because she knew she couldn’t go through with the pregnancy, and then she turned to alcohol to cope with what happened to her. But we don’t learn this until the final pages of the book. So when we’re reading from Megan’s POV and she’s angry at Pooja for being reckless around her kids, we can’t help but agree. Pooja is a liability! She must be fired! And then we don’t find out until the very end just how hard Pooja’s life has been and how her poverty and her social status and her total lack of support system attributed to this.

“I agreed to move our family to India with one explicit condition: I would hire domestic staff guiltlessly and lavishly. I’d outsource shopping, meal planning, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. It was Tom’s career that pushed us into India, but I was determined that my work, too, should benefit.”

This book is actually incredibly well-written, so I finished it rather quickly. I enjoyed the direction of the chapters and I wanted to find out more about Megan’s live-in hired help. I wanted to hear their stories, so I kept reading. But Megan? I don’t think this book paints her in a positive light, and I didn’t really take to her. She’s privileged and she’s rich and she takes it upon herself to tell the stories of her help, when really, she doesn’t have a strong cultural understanding of their lives or their suffering. She’s telling their stories from her perspective, and her perspective is incredibly warped and narrow-minded.

I guess I can commend Megan on her acknowledgement of her own judgement. in the beginning, her maid takes her child for a walk and immediately Megan stresses out and worries that they’ve kidnapped her child to sell into slavery. Acknowledging this incredibly judgemental thought means she’s not holding any secrets back in the book. I guess there’s bravery in allowing yourself to look bad.

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Women’s Work
Megan K. Stack
May 2019
Scribe Publications

The long-awaited second volume of Nelson Mandela’s memoirs, left unfinished at his death and never before available, are here completed and expanded with notes and speeches written by Mandela during his historic presidency, making for a moving sequel to his worldwide bestseller Long Walk to Freedom.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first president of a democratic South Africa. From the outset, he was committed to serving only a single five-year term. During his presidency, he and his government ensured that all of South Africa’s citizens became equal before the law, and he laid the foundation for turning a country riven by centuries of colonialism and apartheid into a fully functioning democracy.

Dare Not Linger is the story of Mandela’s presidential years, drawing heavily on the memoir he began to write as he prepared to leave office, but was unable to finish. Now the acclaimed South African writer Mandla Langa has completed the task, using Mandela’s unfinished draft, detailed notes that Mandela made as events were unfolding, and a wealth of unseen archival material. With a prologue by Mandela’s widow, Graca Machel, the result is a vivid and often inspirational account of Mandela’s presidency and the creation of a new democracy. It tells the story of a country in transition and the challenges Mandela faced as he strove to make his vision for a liberated South Africa a reality.

Dare Not Linger began as Nelson Mandela’s unfinished handwritten memoir and was completed by South African novelist Mandla Langa. Because of Mandela’s age and ill health, he was unable to finish his manuscript and he died in 2013. But now in 2017, the sequel to Long Walk to Freedom has finally been finished and published.

This memoir details Mandela’s five years as South Africa’s president after the collapse of apartheid — it begins just as he is leaving prison after spending 27 years incarcerated for fighting white minority rule. In 1994, he became South Africa’s first democratically elected President. He pledged that he would only serve for five years.

“Mandela’s personal warmth towards people from all walks of life, from gardeners, cleaners, clerks and typists to those in the most senior roles, did not go unnoticed. Those who came across him in the course of their work describe him as generous, self-effacing and easy-going: a man who knew how to be an ordinary person.”

Mandela wrote 10 chapters of his memoir, and Mandla was brought in to write the remaining chapters. Mandla used a lot of research, interviews and notes to complete the book, managing to bring the rest of Mandela’s story to the page.

Dare Not Linger allows for Mandela’s thoughts on certain political matters – which weren’t previously known – to come to the forefront. He had a strained relationship with former president FW de Klerk, and reading the book allows us to see just how frustrated Mandela was. We also learn about Mandela’s marriage breakdown with Winnie Mandela, and the strain that this put on Mandela’s role as the President.

I did feel like this book was rather dense, and at times I found it a struggle to read. The reader does have to have some sort of understanding about South African politics in order to understand the references in the book, and sometimes I felt like parts of the book were just going over my head.

“Mandela’s tendency to canvass for views outside conventional circles was perhaps controversial. He didn’t hesitate to call to a meeting anyone he deemed suitable to throw light onto a subject…this gravitational pull towards people was mutual; people from all corners of society wished to interact with him and vice versa.”

Mandela was a fantastic communicator, and at times, friend. He was grateful for what he had — he insisted on making his own hotel bed, and he always cleaned his own shoes on a plane. Whilst his personality doesn’t really come through in his memoirs, it is external observations of him that allow us to get a sense of who Mandela really was. He was comfortable with forgiveness, and generous in his teachings.

“I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”

This book is dense and requires a fair bit of effort to read. I only recommend this to readers who are genuinely interested in his presidential years (because that’s really all this book covers – it rarely talks about anything else but politics). Overall, it’s really inspiring to read this because Nelson Mandela was a truly unique leader.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years
Nelson Mandela and Mandla Langa
November 2017
Pan Macmillan Publishers

An electric and shocking memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated Maggie’s life. The childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.

This is a memoir with a difference: seventeen encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal to us a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. Spare, elegant and utterly candid, it is a book to make you question yourself.

I Am I Am I Am is as shocking as it is inviting. Maggie O’Farrell documents these near-death experiences with what feels like third person narration, separating herself from them so she can accurately describe the events and how they unfolded, whilst also being able to remember and articulate exactly how she felt at the time and how it then affected her life afterwards.

This memoir is intimate, and whilst it is compact enough to read in one sitting, the reader walks away from it feeling like they’ve been punched.

Maggie opens the book with a chapter about her narrow escape from a rapist and murderer:

“On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears…I passed him earlier, further down the glen. We greeted each other…he has been waiting for me: he has planned this whole thing, carefully, meticulously, and I have walked into his trap.”

It almost seems fictional, how some of these near-death experiences unfolded — Maggie and her husband are overseas travelling when an armed robber holds a machete to her throat and demands they give him all of their cash. It’s heart-wrenching, but it’s also enticing. You’re sucked into the stories.

Each chapter tells of a different story, and the timeline moves around from the 1980s to the 1990s and then early into the 2000s — the timeline does not move chronologically. Her husband and children weave in and out of the memoir, but Maggie remains the central focus. We are intrigued by her life and determined to read as much as she will give us.

I Am I Am I Am allows the reader to confront their own vulnerability; we become determined to make our lives count. I finished some of these chapters and thought ‘what would I do in this situation? Would I be able to survive it?’

In one particular chapter, Maggie is sitting inside her car with her baby, breastfeeding. They’re parked on the side of a deserted highway and her husband has walked over the hill to watch the waves roll in. Maggie, alone with her child, sees two strange men approaching the car:

“…the men have seen my panic, see my problem, and now they are running and I have no idea what they want — money, car, baby, woman — but I don’t want to find out, I don’t need to know the answer to that question because maybe they don’t even know themselves. Maybe they’re just ready to react and exploit whatever they’ll find here.”

Amidst all of these true stories, Maggie has found a way to embed what she’s learnt into the book. She confronts what she’s gone through and how it affected her, and she often reminisces about these experiences with maturity.

“You do walk out. The nurse tries to stop you but you don’t listen. You’ve been through this enough times to be fully aware of ‘what happens next’. As you take the stairs down, away from the scanning department, you feel the notion, the idea of the child leaving you with each step.”

There’s a nice connection between her childhood and then her experiences as a mother raising her own daughter. Maggie grew up with a rare illness, and her daughter has grown up with severe allergies. As a result, a lot of Maggie’s learnings as a child have helped her parent her daughter.

I can’t fault this book. It draws you in and you find yourself holding your breath almost the entire way through. You know Maggie has survived everything, because she’s written this book, but you are desperate to find out how these events have unfolded. And how she’s escaped them.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am I am I am
Maggie O’Farrell
September 2017
Hachette Book Publishers