Debra Adelaide’s novel is a tribute to her late friend Gabrielle Carey and encompasses a lifetime of connection.
In measured, unsentimental prose, Debra Adelaide tells the story of a beloved friendship that ended with her friend’s suicide. It is an expression of grief, a lament, sometimes a protest, but it is also a celebration of friendship and the things friends do: writing, reading, walking, and drinking a cold beer on a hot afternoon.
Adelaide describes her book as auto-fiction, based on her friendship with writer Gabrielle Carey. By choosing not to call this mostly true story a memoir, Adelaide gave herself freedom to write from memory, without detailed fact checking, and to explore the reason why her friend chose to end her life – something she could never be sure of as a non-fiction fact. That freedom gives her writing a lyrical freedom that, as the author or editor of 18 books, Adelaide has full command of. It gives the reader the satisfaction of her hard-earned insight. And it gives Carey the dignity of maintaining her own mystery.
The story is told in fragments, moving backwards and forwards in time; the genuine suspense and page-turning quality of the book come from following Adelaide’s stumbling progress towards understanding why this beloved and successful woman made her final choice. The rhythm of the book is the rhythm of our hearts as Adelaide struggles with the task of caring for a friend drowning in mental and spiritual pain.
These two friends are readers and writers and that is the foundation of their long, close, connection. At one time they were going to write a book together called Agony Author, full of hard-hitting, brutally honest advice to writers. Because of the trouble this book would cause them in their professional lives, they decided to write it anonymously. They never finished the book but spent many hours laughing as they created ridiculous and libellous alphabetical entries for it.
Adelaide remembered how her friend had needed something to laugh at in her final days and told herself off for forgetting to read her entries from Agony Author.
But then I realised the worst irony of all, the greatest fuck-you from the universe, the biggest glob of ibis shit: words were our life, but they could not save a life.
The reference to the ibis is part of a long-running joke through the book, beautifully brought out in the UQP book design, about how Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and other things, was represented by the head of the sacred ibis. And ibises were the bin chickens that ransacked the bins they walked past on their long rambling neighbourhood walks together.
There are many other birds in the book, the ones that flock in the back yards of the homes the two friends lived in, living their own noisy but mysterious lives: cockatoos, galahs, kookaburras, topknot pigeons and Indian myna birds that Adelaide squirted with water pistols in a futile attempt to keep them out of the house. The birds bring humour and distraction but also a reminder of life, beauty and soaring flight going on around us, all the time, even when we are in despair.
What Jan Steen and Peter Breughel the Elder brought to painting, Debra Adelaide brings to writing. She brings us ‘kitchen drawers with scissors, string, chopsticks, a sticky-tape dispenser. Toothpicks, rubber bands, corks, drink coasters, metal skewers, egg rings.’ She brings us chickens in the garden, ‘five silkies that cooed and burbled in the back yard and produced tiny cream eggs that were almost too perfect to break’. She brings us delicious food prepared over a whole day by the friends when they lived together, moule made with ancho, guajillo, negro and chipotle chiles. And she brings us children, tucked into bed for a sleepover.
I settled them all in the double bed in order to read to them. They sat there, two fair and one dark, listening to the stories, all content despite the oldest showing signs of coming down with the flu, and her sister remaining quiet and watchful. The youngest one, their cousin, sitting in the middle, was beaming with joy at the novelty of sleeping with the others. Ardent personalities, all of them. All fresh, barely opened notebooks on which the most amazing stories were yet to be inscribed.
Adelaide’s friend believed that, if you were a prose writer, non-fiction was the only form to explore. Adelaide believes that fiction is the highest form of writing to which one could aspire. It was a fundamental difference between them. But, with this book, Adelaide does what her friend can no longer do.
I realised that it was up to me, and so here I was. Now it was me, peeling back skin to get to the truth, and as I peered closer, identifying tissue, bones, veins, I realised I was doing so because she could not. Not this time.
Debra Adelaide When I Am Sixty-Four University of Queensland Press 2026 HB 208pp $34.99
Sandra Hogan is the author of bestselling non-fiction spy story With My Little Eye. Her memoir My Mother’s Secret will be published by Allen & Unwin in March 2027.
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women writers, autofiction, Debra | Adelaide, friendship, Gabrielle Carey, mental illness
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