Tag: memoir

Book review — The Girl in the Green Dress, by Jeni Haynes and Dr George Blair-West

Title: The Girl in the Green Dress

Authors: Jeni Haynes and Dr George Blair-West, with Alley Pascoe

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2022; RRP: $32.99

The Girl in the Green Dress is the story of Dr Jennifer ‘Jeni’ Haynes, who lives with multiple personality disorder (MPD), a subgroup of dissociative identity disorder (DID) — a psychological state where the mind separates into multiple selves.

Developing MPD was how she protected herself from a horrifying childhood of sexual, physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father.  At six months of age, her sense of self divided and she became Symphony, the girl in the green dress, her new core personality creating multiple other personalities through the years that followed, each giving specific strengths to Jeni to prevent her from being destroyed by her father’s abuse.

Dr George Blair-West is a psychiatrist specialising in relationship therapy and dissociative trauma work, who worked with Dr Haynes for over twenty years from 1998.

Dr Haynes’ father, Richard Haynes, had what she termed ‘built-in respectability’, protected by his good reputation established by being descended from a noted English family and an expert in the field of electronic engineering.

Failing to get help from the medical profession and determined to find justice for herself, Jeni Haynes spent eighteen years at university, struggling and ultimately succeeding in graduating with a degree in psychology and a Masters in legal studies and criminal justice.

The book begins where she ends her educational journey and enters the courtroom where the truth of what happened to her at the hands of her father would finally be tested in the legal system — not by the health system, blind to what was happening to her and consistently failing to address her condition or her social and home environment.

The narrative structure is an interesting mix of biography and autobiography, with the main character and her psychiatrist writing not only their separate roles of patient and psychiatrist but also of the shifting relationship between them over the years they worked together.

According to what is being relayed, chapters (and sections within chapters) alternate between Dr Blair-West providing information about his meetings with Jeni Haynes and expository material defining psychiatric terms and treatments, and Dr Haynes speaking about her MPD and Dr Haynes as Jeni Haynes recreating her experiences in the voice of one of the multiple personalities she created.

Jeni Haynes in conversation with Ginger Gorman

@ the national library of Australia

The Girl in the Green Dress is a harrowing work and there are warnings to this effect both at the beginning and dotted throughout. Initially I found this intrusive, but as the sheer volume and extent of the abuse was disclosed, I found the warnings helped, certainly preparing me as reader for increasingly distressing information.

When it is Jeni telling her story, and not Dr Jennifer Haynes, her words come from one of many, many different identities, each performing different roles protecting her. A major strength is how the material is presented such that the reader does not get completely lost. Each voice emerges as clearly different in tone and personality. A useful list of them all by name, their place in the hierarchy of protective layers, and the particular function each performs is given at the beginning, providing a useful character-based map to her inner life.

Control of the impact of the material is also held tightly within a framework of chapters and sections where her psychiatrist links what Jeni says to the physical development of the brain from very young and onwards, and to the medical and social environment in which Jeni battles to survive.

Read an excerpt of The Girl in the Green Dress

@ the sMH

Some of the most disturbing material relates to the responses of psychiatrists and psychologists from whom Jeni, now a deeply damaged adult, seeks help. Failing repeatedly to find that help, she decides she must find her own answers, realising her father’s reputation was always going to be a barrier to being believed.

Dr Blair-West also points out that it took a long time before DID was recognised, let alone MPD, which meant few were qualified or accessible to recognise and treat it.

The language of both Dr Haynes and Dr Blair-Smith is aimed at professionals in the world of psychiatry and mental illness, and laymen, moving smoothly between complex concepts explained by Jeni’s doctor and Dr Haynes articulating her experiences through the multiple voices via which we see into Jeni Haynes’ life.

My only concern is that, given the extent of her husband’s extremely violent and manipulative activities throughout, there is scanty information about the inexplicable failure of Jeni’s mother to know what was happening in her own home over all those years. Undiagnosed autism is offered briefly at the start and in a little more detail at the end, but there is little more than that. Though the abuse ceased when Jeni turned eleven, this response extended to decisions she made after Richard Haynes had left the family home, taking his other daughter with him and abusing her also, and encouraging Jeni to maintain contact with him, so keeping her within his psychological reach.

By not addressing this, the image of her mother lacks the depth her position in the family requires.It would have been a significantly stronger work, and kinder to her mother, if how the undiagnosed autism related to her behaviour had been addressed, both specifically in her case and generally how autism could lead to it. Also of use would be when and how it eventually came to be diagnosed, including what prompted that step, using the same openness and insight as shown in describing her daughter’s experience and her father’s behaviour.

In conclusion, however, I was left more with an overall sense that The Girl in the Green Dress is not only a courageous story about how the brain of one vulnerable baby girl changed to protect her from unspeakable abuse and helped her emerge victorious, but also a story that raises awareness of the role our own brains play in protecting us and how they are doing that right now, more than we might ever know. 

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy supplied by the publisher

Book review – 28, by Brandon Jack

Title: 28

Author: Brandon Jack

Publisher: Allen & Unwin,  2021; RRP: $29.99

Brandon Jack, known as BJ, is the youngest son of a sports-mad family. His father is an ex-professional rugby player, and his two brothers also played at a high level. His mother, he admits regretfully, was someone he did not know outside her role supporting her sons’ football-filled childhoods. Family life circled around sport: attending training, playing games, talking about and watching games with all family members fully involved.

When BJ reached 18 he was drafted to the Sydney Swans AFL side where his brother Kieren also played, joining an intake of 44 new players that would fill only 22 available spaces in the senior games. His journey is told chronologically, from childhood to his final decision to leave professional football.

BJ stayed with the Swans from 2014 until 2018. The first two years he went all out, doing all that was asked of him and more, undertaking gruelling training sessions and extensive post-game sessions watching replays of the game and micro analysing personal and team performance. Despite all his efforts he was frustrated by how he failed to be chosen for senior games, instead relegated to reserve. At the same time he continued his love of heavy metal music, learning guitar and enjoying writing, including songs.

Around 2016, as disillusionment set in at his repeated failure to fulfil his football dreams, he began to question his life choices. In the process he discovered a stronger than expected identification with the music and writing side of himself. His changing feelings included re-evaluating the almost hothouse environment in which he spent his childhood with his sports-obsessed family, discovering in the process that underlying his dream to pursue high-level football was mainly a desire to play with Kieren.

At this point, still floundering and unable to make a final break but already committed to a second two years, he decided to complete the two years simply to honour his contractual obligations. This he did, playing as required and fulfilling only basic training requirements. To fill the emptiness he felt inside he indulged heavily in drugs, alcohol and expensive and stupid pranks, which meant when he finally finished he discovered he had only $30,000 in savings to show for five years’ work.

Brandon Jack talks about life after footy

at ABC news breakfast

I found this autobiography totally engrossing despite the fact that my interest in sport is casual at the best. Its raw and unfiltered honesty leaps off the pages. His analysis of those in his life is rigorous, whether he is looking at himself, his family, or the sporting personnel central to how the Australian football world operates.

He comes across as focussed and fair, and worth reading about, an athlete and a writer who can speak with careful insight into his upbringing and his disillusionment with the way high-level football works and also share stories of his football mates, some of whom he maintains connection with, such as regularly meeting with a favourite coach to kick a ball back and forth in a local park after he left the Swans.

His relationship with his family is complex and written through the eyes of a still-angry son and brother but he writes with care as well as passion. Family and football come across as intertwined, his dedication to the game born of family ties as exclusive and blinkered as that of a high-level football team. 

The language of 28 was particularly effective in drawing me in. He uses the short, terse and urgent notes in his training manuals to describe his first year, which captures perfectly his almost manic commitment to training and self analysis. He uses football language, blithely assuming we will all know what he is referring to, as do all those deeply enmeshed in their chosen worlds. While the words and phrases were warm and familiar, as I have heard them in the background on radio and TV all my life – sometimes to hear how Geelong was doing – some did require googling to understand what he was referring to. 

Once past the first year, football language doesn’t dominate as much as he moves into areas such as a thoughtful section analysing the difference between sport and creativity, and artist and athlete. This shift adds to the raw feeling of the book, strengthening the sense of who Brandon Jack is and showing the artist and musician within and emphasising the struggle it was to extricate himself from who he thought he was to being who he actually was.

 It’s also an excellent opportunity to be a fly on the wall in the training room of an Australian Football League team!

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell, February 2022

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy provided by the publisher

Memoir workshop with Jenny Valentish

Memoir writing – be it book, blog, essay, or legacy for the family – can be daunting. That might be because you’re stumped as to how to start (your life has been EPIC … and spans ‘several’ decades). Or perhaps you don’t know where would be a fitting point to end. Maybe the thing that’s always stopped you from writing your story, or a part of it, is you’re afraid of exposing yourself – or of upsetting other people. That can be paralysing, but there are ways around all of this.

In this workshop, journalist Jenny Valentish, journalist and author of Woman of Substances: A Journey into Addiction and Treatment, trouble-shoots the concerns you may have. We’ll go deep into structure – prologues, ways of ordering things, themes as motifs, and weaving in research (if that’s your thing). There are methods of jogging your memory and reinhabiting your younger self. We’ll find ways to describe different people without you getting cast out of your family, and look at some of the disclaimers that famous memoirists have put on their work. There’s a section on nailing tone, humour and finding your voice, and we’ll look at how to avoid sounding self-conscious.

Workshop details

When: Saturday 20 March 2021, noon-3pm

Where: Training Room 1, Eastwood Leisure Centre, 20 Eastwood St, Ballarat Central, VIC 3350

Cost: Ballarat Writers Members $80, non-members $90. Please note: the workshop is limited to 12 participants.

Bookings: At Trybooking

Other details: Due to the venue’s COVIDSafe procedures, we are unable to serve drinks or share food at this event. Please BYO water bottle and snacks. The centre is directly across the road from Ballarat Central’s Ferguson’s and Baker’s Delight bakeries. Hand sanitising will be available. Social distancing will be in place and participants will not be required to wear masks under current protocols.

Sign up to become a Ballarat Writers member. 

writer Jenny Valentish

About Jenny Valentish

Journalist Jenny Valentish’s third book is Woman of Substances: A Journey into Addiction and Treatment, which blends research and memoir. It was long-listed for a Walkley Book Award and is now on the recommended reading list for several university courses. Jenny is the former editor of Triple J’s Jmag and Time Out (Melbourne edition) and regularly contributes to The GuardianABCThe Age and more. She is working on her fourth book, to be published by Black Inc in 2021. She has held a memoir writing workshop for The Monthly, delivered a course to Writers Victoria members three times and has taught first-person writing at Monash, Collarts, and to Catherine Deveny’s Gunnas. A version of the workshop has also been developed for drug and alcohol professionals and their clients. Find out more at Jenny’s website

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