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A review by tasmanian_bibliophile
Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight
3.0
‘The house we lived in had three storeys and six bedrooms.’
In this collection of short stories, Tegan Bennett Daylight explores some of the hazards of moving from adolescence to adulthood. It’s an invitation, especially if you are female, to revisit your own transition to adulthood. Do you remember school ovals on hot afternoons? Did you ever sneak alcohol from home, or elsewhere? How sophisticated we thought we were, some of us with cigarettes, slaves to fashion, dreading and dreaming of sex. Wanting (usually) to be popular and one of the ‘in crowd’. And then moving from home, into hostel accommodation or share houses.
Some travel, others stay near home. The dramas of this period of life: all-encompassing at the time, usually less so with the passage of time. Oh yes, memories.
In these short stories, Tegan Bennett Daylight takes us back to that time. A time when most of us felt uncomfortable in bodies that were changing in ways we couldn’t control. A time when many of us had our first encounters with death, with sex, with learning to navigate in a world where we had to take responsibility. One young woman, Tasha, appears in several of these stories. This provides some structure to the snippets of life we observe, a degree of continuity in the shift to adulthood.
The stories are each short journeys, we don’t stay in the past for long. Just long enough to catch a glimpse, just long enough for memories to surface. Long enough to remember how awkward life was, how filled with anguish, despair and disappointment. And long enough, to realise that, if we are reading about it now, we survived.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
In this collection of short stories, Tegan Bennett Daylight explores some of the hazards of moving from adolescence to adulthood. It’s an invitation, especially if you are female, to revisit your own transition to adulthood. Do you remember school ovals on hot afternoons? Did you ever sneak alcohol from home, or elsewhere? How sophisticated we thought we were, some of us with cigarettes, slaves to fashion, dreading and dreaming of sex. Wanting (usually) to be popular and one of the ‘in crowd’. And then moving from home, into hostel accommodation or share houses.
Some travel, others stay near home. The dramas of this period of life: all-encompassing at the time, usually less so with the passage of time. Oh yes, memories.
In these short stories, Tegan Bennett Daylight takes us back to that time. A time when most of us felt uncomfortable in bodies that were changing in ways we couldn’t control. A time when many of us had our first encounters with death, with sex, with learning to navigate in a world where we had to take responsibility. One young woman, Tasha, appears in several of these stories. This provides some structure to the snippets of life we observe, a degree of continuity in the shift to adulthood.
The stories are each short journeys, we don’t stay in the past for long. Just long enough to catch a glimpse, just long enough for memories to surface. Long enough to remember how awkward life was, how filled with anguish, despair and disappointment. And long enough, to realise that, if we are reading about it now, we survived.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith