Review: "The Girls" by Chloe Higgins

The Girls by Chloe Higgins
Published 2019 via Picador Australia
★★★

In 2005, Higgins had a 'normal' life: parents and two sisters, plans for university, day-to-day good and bad. And then the car her father was driving went off the road, and Higgins' sisters—she had stayed home to study—were both killed, and her life's trajectory skidded sharply off course.

In The Girls, Higgins tracks the what came after: the way her father folded into himself with grief and self-blame, and her mother desperately tightened her grip on her one remaining child, and Higgins came unmoored. What interests me most is her commentary on memory and its inconsistencies: this thing happened like this, she'll say, and then she'll check in with a parent or a friend or someone else who was there, and they'll say no, it happened like this. Memory is a fallible thing, made ever more fallible by grief. And then the bigger gaps:

Besides these small details, my mind draws a blank.

I tell my mother about my shame and my lack of memories, and she says, 'But don't you remember? That time Carlie got her foot stuck in the bus door and you helped her and screamed at the bus driver to stop, got the door opened, helped her off and walked her home?'

I nod.

'Don't you remember?'

I don't. (52)

This is one of the things that terrifies me about grief, the idea of forgetting what came before. I worry about memories worn smooth with time, memories that you've turned over so many times in your mind that the sharpness of the details is gone, but also about memories that just slip away from disuse (or, as is perhaps more apt in Higgins' case, trauma) with nobody to remind you of them. The memories you don't know are missing.

The scope of the loss described in The Girls is devastating and the grief messy and raw. I'm still working out what I as a reader am looking for in grief memoirs, which I approach with trepidation, but it's hard not to respect Higgins' willingness to unravel it all and stitch it all up again.