Whenever You’re Ready (Trish Bolton, A&U)

Trish Bolton’s debut is a reckoning with grief. An exploration of ‘those feelings [that are] impossible to separate, a great tidal wave of loss and remorse, of love and longing’. Ambitious in its scope, Whenever You’re Ready traverses the wake of a murder-suicide among three generations of friends. Claire and Jeremy are gone, leaving behind an adult daughter and a cryptic letter begging for forgiveness. Claire’s best friends, Alice and Lizzie, are reeling. Alice has lost the security of stable work. Lizzie, ‘who for so long had lived with grief’, is trying to reconcile a decades-old rift with her daughter Margot, formed after Lizzie’s son died and her family spiralled. Margot is recovering from a heroin addiction and has a burgeoning social media habit. All three women are tenuously holding it together. In Whenever You’re Ready, Bolton writes complicated and interesting older women railing against their societal invisibility. With a feminist tone, the book examines the gendered distribution of labour: motherhood, domestic work, and overwhelming emotional labour. The grief in Bolton’s novel is weighty and pervasive, but her tone is light and matter-of-fact; it’s as if Sally Hepworth wrote Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light. Bolton has written through the ‘not knowing what to say’ of grief. This book will also appeal to fans of Gail Honeyman with her rendering of retired, but not retiring, women.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Emily Westmoreland is the program director of Willy Lit Fest, the founder of Dinner Party Press and part of the prize-team behind the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She works as a bookseller by day. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews