Gaby Naher

Nyima Drakpa, a twenty-nine-year-old Tibetan monk, died on 1 October 2003. PEN believes that his death was caused by beatings he received at the Tawu County Public Security Detention Centre, in the Kardze region of Tibet. Following his arrest in May 2000, authorities severely beat Nyima Drakpa in order to extract a confession for his alleged crimes. The head of the police team that recorded the confession was reportedly rewarded with a car for his ‘exemplary deed’. Nyima Drakpa was later sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in a closed trial: his crimes were listed as ‘endangering state security’ and ‘incitement against the masses’.

These three memoirs share central focus on fathers: Gaby Naher’s is a meditation on fatherhood, Shirley Painter’s is about surviving an abusive one, while Cliff Nichols’s relates his life as an alcoholic and unreliable parent. They are also all part of the current flood of life-writing appearing from Australian publishing houses. Drusilla Modjeska, writing recently about the failings of contemporary fiction, argued that creative writing courses since the 1980s have produced a spate of postmodern first novels that were ‘tricksy and insubstantial’, deconstructing narrative at the expense of well-developed plots and characters. These courses may also account for much of the current memoir boom, feeding the demands of our voyeuristic culture. But publishers have a responsibility to readers to tame the genre’s self-revelatory excesses.