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The grey dress

Breaking through to life and change
by
August 2024, no. 467

For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying by Ailsa Piper

Allen & Unwin, $34.99 pb, 337 pp

The grey dress

Breaking through to life and change
by
August 2024, no. 467

Shortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 2014, Ailsa Piper put on a grey dress which she wore each day for the next six months. Of all the recurring and often exquisite motifs in her memoir, For Life, this prosaic re-worn grey dress speaks most eloquently of the dullness, constraint, and repetition of grief. Late in the memoir, Piper mentions a photograph that her husband took of her on holiday. She is naked in a thicket of tea-trees, and although she is not, at that point, a swimmer, she is wet from the ocean and thrilled. The contrast between the solitary costume of bereavement and this bare delight could not be more marked.

For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying

For Life: A memoir of living and dying – and flying

by Ailsa Piper

Allen & Unwin, $34.99 pb, 337 pp

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