Writing by Tina Shaw // photograph by Richard Doran
Maxine has been losing things lately. Her car in the shopping centre carpark. Important work files—and her job as a result. Her marbles? ‘Mild cognitive impairment’, according to the doctor. Time for a nursing home, according to her daughter, Rose.
Rose has her own troubles with memory: a recurring vision of a locked cupboard, claustrophobic panic. Something in the shadows. Something to do with the old family house in Kutarere.
Back in that house by the beach, Maxine and Rose try to find their bearings. But they can’t move forward without dealing with the past—and the past has a few more surprises in store.
As you can see from this blurb, my novel, A House Built on Sand, can be distilled down to a few paragraphs. And yet, it’s an entire world in itself, like I think all novels aim to be – opening up a certain place and time for the reader, and inviting them in.
The original inspiration for this novel came from a pretty hard place: my mother’s dementia. She had Lewy Body Dementia – the kind that actor Robin Williams had – which is not only about losing your memory but also involves distortions in reality. My mother would see things that weren’t there, and hear people talking when there was nobody around. It could’ve been creepy, but I was always relieved to see she didn’t seem that bothered by them. The dog she saw in her bedroom at night was more of a nuisance than a thing to fear; the Greek statue she saw was interesting though puzzling: What was it doing in her lounge?
I knew all along that I wanted to write about dementia. It’s a person-altering disease, and affects the whole family. It’s also very much about memory and identity … Who are you if you can no longer remember?
But how to write about such a traumatic journey?
A window opened up when I saw the harrowing yet psychologically brilliant film The Father. Anthony Hopkins plays a man who is in the clutches of dementia … or is he? At times – if the viewer accepts his reality – then it seems more like he’s the victim of a malevolent plot. Things happen that don’t make sense, and people he knows seem to change in a mysterious way. It’s an incredibly menacing film.
In this film, dementia is the real villain. And for me, in a fiction sense, things clicked into place.
Considering the shiftiness of memory, I found myself naturally drawn to a storyline that held a mystery in the past. A mystery that my protagonist Maxine is driven to discover, or I should say re-discover, because it’s something she once knew about but has lost her grip on because of the LBD. Now, she must do all she can to remember what took place – before it’s too late – and to make sense of it. I wanted to capture the scrabbled nature of the LBD brain. Things are not what they seem, memories are uncertain, even what’s right in front of your face seems mixed-up. What is true, or false?
Setting this urgency against Rose’s life – Maxine’s put-upon daughter – helped to show the weirdness of what Maxine is going through. Rose works in early childcare and wants to have a baby, but can’t. She’s got claustrophobia that she’s trying to heal. She would like to have a simple life, and especially one where she didn’t have to go running after her dotty mum. I discovered early on that she is Maxine’s foil, if you like.
With every novel I write, I learn things. With A House Built on Sand, I learnt how the writing can take you to different places. How you don’t know everything – there is mystery and things can sort of ‘happen’ in the process. How the story and characters reveal themselves piece by piece. How sometimes the writing doesn’t seem to work, and you’ve just got to stick with it till you get past the snag. How the writing, when it’s going well, feels like your real life.
Most of all, it’s about trust.
Tina Shaw’s novel A HOUSE BUILT ON SAND is out now in paperback from Text Publishing
