Reviews

The Mirror Book, a memoir

The Mirror Book, a memoir, shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award

"The prose in Charlotte Grimshaw's The Mirror Book is exquisitely precise in its navigation of the complexity of the author's family dynamics." - Judges’ report, the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award 

Extremely well-written...a deeply affectionate portrait, but always probing and unflinching in its examination of family and self - The Sydney Morning Herald

The Mirror Book is not about any objective truth or correcting a record . . . Rather, it argues for a multiplicity of stories and truths to be allowed to coexist, for individual narratives to accompany and complicate each other, rather than to compete for primacy or demand consensus. . . . The Mirror Book is full of shifts and the occasional jolting realignment, but it has a hard-nosed curiosity and a determination towards honesty that are compelling and poignant. It is a fascinating exploration of the complexity of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other – everything that shapes them and what they might shape in return. - Fiona Wright, The Saturday Paper, Australia

With bracing clarity, Grimshaw strenuously interrogates the dynamics of her 'tidily chaotic, respectably anarchic, stably unstable' family, delicately tracing the rising curve of friction and chaos within it . . . To be clear, this is in no way a resentful or angry book. Grimshaw maintains a calm, diagnostic coolness throughout when it would be so easy to write in anger. . . . A writer of unquestionable depth and insight, Grimshaw has what must be an almost overwhelming (for her, I imagine) and meticulous ability to view and consider everything she reports on from every angle imaginable . . . The Mirror Book details excruciating grief, loneliness, infidelity, psychological and emotional abuse, and physical violence . . . Grimshaw is a peerless writer with a strong sense of acuity and The Mirror Book is one of the best New Zealand memoirs I've read in years. Sure, it's a juicy page-turner but it is also full of surprises, acutely reported, and, as you would expect from Grimshaw, is written beautifully with dignified poise and care. A reflection of clarity and beauty. - Kiran Dass, Metro Magazine 

The Mirror Book is a fascinating portrait of not only a family, but the writing process. How we magpie material (go and make a story out of it) and what we build from it — and at whose expense? And where the line between fact and fiction is drawn...
The writing in this memoir is astounding. – Rachael King, Academy of New Zealand Literature

'Lovely childhood, house full of books.' That's the story the family told about themselves – but The Mirror Book shatters it all. Very occasionally you encounter a book where you think – this writer saved their own life in the writing of this. . . to be a witness as Grimshaw's pen draws out the story of her life is to completely buy into a mission that is righteous and urgent. Although it deals in the intimacy of this very specific New Zealand family, it pans out to take in the universal. The vertigo of the book's revelations come from its interrogation of our understanding of reality in its most proximal sense – whether we really know our family at all, and if not – how can we know ourselves? . . . Grimshaw's unnerving approach to storytelling is to show you something sacred, and then slide it out from beneath you. . . . I am convinced that telling our stories is existentially important, and I'm grateful that Charlotte has told hers. What she has achieved here is to make herself wholly visible and this memoir invites the rest of us to do the same. - Emma Espiner, The Spinoff

The Mirror Book is a slim little dagger of a thing that marches right up to Stead's version (three volumes, hulking big hardbacks, the third is out in May) and stares it down. . . . To read it is to watch a person finally stand up straight, stand in the light. . . . You don't need to know anything about Stead or poetry or New Zealand letters to be gripped by this book. You'll also, early on, forget about the he-said she-saids: Grimshaw's a lawyer and she is absolutely scrupulous with her receipts. It's March and I'm calling it: book of the year. - Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff

Infidelity, sexual assault, domestic violence, literary battles and a family feud... it's not a novel but award-winning author Charlotte Grimshaw's explosive memoir . . . The Mirror Book is many things: an examination of memory, an exploration of psychological mysteries, a plea for understanding. But much of it is a reckoning of an existential crisis. - NZ Listener

Grimshaw attempts to excavate the truth of her family's history after years of mythmaking by her famous father — in which he was readily abetted by the rest of the family, where a frequently referenced "lovely childhood, house full of books" was truthfully only half the story. The memoir is fascinating not only on its own merits but for the ripples it has caused in certain literary and media circles — the unusually frank nature of Grimshaw's writing, which at times is as fond as it is damning, has prompted a host of remarkably thoughtful and interesting reviews and interviews. - North and South

The Mirror Book, a memoir . . . is the most harrowing, profoundly moving work of her prolific career. - Sunday Star-Times

This is The Mirror Book you are hearing a lot about: the explosive story of how the daughter denounced the father, Sylvia Plath-style. (And, like Plath, she denounced the mother too.) But that's only part of it. . . . To read The Mirror Book is to feel that fiction has finally stepped through the looking glass and emerged as fact, with all the bravery and all the difficulty that suggests. Where Grimshaw's fiction can go after this book has both cleared the air and related the backstory is anyone's guess. - Philip Matthews, Newsroom

This consequent memoir releases the dark swirling currents of Grimshaw's past loneliness, sense of neglect, alienation and sheer horror, flooding the public plain of sunlit family memory.
Grimshaw, who has only published fiction before, has the ability to tell a good story. Parts of this memoir, like the young kids' dangerous journey down the Waitākere gorge, read like fiction...
Charlotte Grimshaw needed to publish this memoir, to finally make her parents listen, because then they would not be able to ignore what she had long been pleading for: their acceptance of her story, and the recognition of who she really is—not what they would like her to be. She has wrested back some control of the story from her father, and this notorious critic, who took no prisoners during his career, ought not to complain. Charlotte is her father's daughter. Perhaps he had not acknowledged the warning from Polish poet Czesław Miłosz: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.' It makes this, appropriately, an epigraph for this memoir.- Landfall Review Online

The strength of her confessional, or analytical, memoirs is that she does not go in for an all-out attack; she depicts family relations sometimes supportive and bantering alongside the dreadful. As she makes clear in her foreword, she does love her parents, lives nearby and would always be there for them. . . . The Mirror Book makes a reader want to revisit all her writing with new eyes... Approaching this book is an exercise in discomfort. It helps to read the book in chunks and take a deep breath. It is a painful world, and one which Grimshaw is hugely brave in confronting publicly, as well as attempting to open a forum, yet again, with her parents. Grimshaw should be commended for her raw openness. - Jessie Neilson, Otago Daily Times