Bring Back Yesterday (Bob Carr, A&U)

In Bring Back Yesterday, journalist and former politician Bob Carr reflects on the sudden death of his wife, Helena, and the life they shared over 5 decades. The memoir records Carr’s attempts to endure grief while navigating the practical and emotional rhythms of living alone after a long partnership that shaped both his personal and intellectual worlds. The book moves fluidly between Carr’s life in Helena’s absence and memories of their shared past, including travel, conversation and cultural curiosity. Some chapters linger on specific moments that swell into narrative significance, while others drift through looser recollections as Carr walks the streets of Sydney, mourning and remembering. Together, they form a mosaic of a relationship rather than a linear account of grief. Carr occasionally moves from first- to third-person narration, offering an almost observational distance, as though he is watching himself from afar, his grief rendered universal. There is a gentle melancholy running through Bring Back Yesterday, but it is never indulgent. Reading it can feel like sitting with a relative who is recounting stories from another time. Helena emerges as a vivid and compelling presence, and someone readers may wish they’d had the honour of meeting. Comparable in tone and subject to Geraldine Brooks’s Memorial Days and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Bring Back Yesterday is a memoir that feels possible only after a full life that has been well lived.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Jess Lomas is the reviews editor at Books+Publishing. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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