Shortlisted for the 2022 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, Kintsugi by Marie O’Rourke is a book that, in her own words, resists the ‘tradition of first person, past-tense, chronological, narrative memoir’. Instead, Kintsugi takes the form of a collection of interlinked essays that are evocative, lyrical and engaging.
O’Rourke writes vulnerably about deeply personal and, at times, traumatic experiences such as family violence, the death of a much-loved sister and a crumbling marriage. Yet, despite at one point encouraging the reader to ‘peer through this keyhole’, this is by no means a tell-all memoir, and O’Rourke avoids straying into what has sometimes been labelled as voyeuristic or ‘trauma porn’. This is, at least in part, a result of the structure of Kintsugi, which appears to draw on Michel de Montaigne’s notion of the ‘essai’, meaning to try, to attempt. At times, O’Rourke meanders from one memory to another or circles back to stories and ideas touched upon in earlier chapters to offer a different perspective or additional insight.
O’Rourke also often plays with form and point-of-view. For example, two essays about motherhood are structured as exhibition catalogues. Elsewhere, in ‘Family Portrait with Caravan, 1977 (Kodachrome Slide)’, O’Rourke writes in present tense from a child’s perspective about a family holiday to Jurien Bay. In this piece, simmering family tension and violence are implied rather than made explicit, and the reader is left to interpret all that is left unsaid.
Each essay can be read independently, but together, they form a larger whole that considers the fragmented and changing nature of memory and the self through what O’Rourke describes as a ‘series of breaks and repairs’. Perhaps this is aptly illustrated in the titular essay, ‘Kintsugi’:
‘I read about the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi. Fixing broken pottery with seams of gold lacquer to draw attention to flaws you might normally hide. So here we are. Here I am. Broken. Repaired and reborn. All those gilt-edged fractures and fragments. Hidden in plain view.’
Kintsugi might be Marie O’Rourke’s debut full-length work, but it firmly establishes her as a powerful voice in creative non-fiction. Highly recommended.