Kintsugi (Marie O’Rourke, Fremantle)

Marie O’Rourke’s book of memoir essays, Kintsugi, shortlisted for the 2022 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, takes its title from the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold. This title reflects her choice to centre the collection around the beauty of fragmentation. O’Rourke weaves in and out of her life, threading pieces of other literature throughout the book while exploring her father’s distance and death, her experience of motherhood and marriage, and her sister’s sudden passing. While O’Rourke’s prose is beautiful and evocative, the essays, which attempt to capture the fluidity of recollection itself by defying principles of chronology and tense, can sometimes lose the reader in their journeys, and perhaps intentionally don’t make apparent their primary themes. Kintsugi, instead, reads more like a book-length memoir with chapters—poetic and free-flowing, grounded in astute observation and internal archaeology. O’Rourke is fiercely experimental and explores themes of loss, perfectionism, longing, and healing, fragmenting her identity within the collection through the use of first-, second-, and third-person points of view. While these experimentations sometimes detract from the overall cohesion of the collection, O’Rourke’s strong voice and intimate prose immerse the reader in her poignant journey into her own memories and identity.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Shivani Prabhu is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews