This is Not My Beautiful Life
by Elly Varrenti
Book review: By Kate Herbert
For those of us who guard our personal lives with metaphorical Rottweilers, Elly Varrenti’s intimate revelations in This is Not My Beautiful Life make us gasp for air. It is the rollicking life and times of a 40-something single mum with hopes and despairs we cowards hide.
Firstly, my own personal declaration: Elly is my friend. We spend countless hours on each other’s couches laughing and lamenting, whining about our lives and advising, or in her case, ignoring advice. (I wish people would listen to me!)
Her book emerged like a phoenix from her occasional musings on ABC Radio National program, Life Matters. If you recognise her honey-toned voice, it will resonate in your head as you read. But the book is a different, albeit related, species.
Such candour is almost shocking to those of us who carry our secrets close. Elly spills her guts about, well, everything: lovers, marriage, divorce, family, co-parenting, food, art, work. You name it, she spills it. It scares me and I know her!
Of course there is great art in her writing. It is poetic, nuanced, colourful, carefully structured yet simultaneously a stream of consciousness. Despite her achingly honest revelations, peer between the lines and you’ll find secreted dozens of unspoken stories just asking to be told. Each acerbic aside masks another narrative. Listen carefully or you might miss them because she’s been heroically tactful in her evasions and eliminations. When one’s life intersects so dramatically with others, it can be a dangerous sport to out people.
Although I heard in person many of these tales of woe and joy– I was even present at the ill-fated wedding – I laughed and cried my way through the book. Each character in her vivid life leaps off the page. Her larger-than-life Italo-Australian family is lovingly drawn. Meet her marvellously blunt, fiercely intelligent and equally hilarious mother, her outrageous sister, her historian father who left when she was thirteen and the beautiful, dysfunctional Nonna from a village near Genova. At Christmas lunch there’s a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Sandinista pilot... “It’s sounding like one of those jokes,” she quips.
There are lovers with bad clothes and worse attitudes, errors of judgement, the dashed hopes of an actor and failed ambitions to be a broadcaster (Shame on ABC for not giving her a radio show). There’s an ex-husband (say no more) and a beautiful, tow-haired little boy who says hilarious five-year old things (“The alien’s name is Kevin and he has antennas”). I can feel his hugs and hear his pearly laughter now.
This unbeautiful life is often discomfiting, helpless and hapless but frequently achingly funny. I’ll leave the last word to Elly, “…it finally dawned on me that the gap between what I thought my life was going to be and how it was actually shaping up opened up like a huge and unforgiving chasm.” Get it now?
By Kate Herbert
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