Child
By (Author) Patti Miller
Allen & Unwin
Allen & Unwin
1st April 1998
Australia
General
Fiction
823
Short-listed for APA Book Design Awards 1998 (Australia)
Paperback
360
Width 130mm, Height 195mm
328g
Corrie and Michael's twenty-year-old son, Tom, goes to Asia after dropping out of university - no-one hears from him and he does not return on the due date. His parents are left to contemplate the nightmarish possibilities. Corrie, haunted by her own unremembered past, waits, while Michael travels through Asia looking for their son.
At home, Corrie begins to write Tom's life from conception to adulthood. Once upon a time when everything was as it should be. She tries to fathom the mysterious unknowability of her own son and soon realises she is writing a spell, trying to call him back into her world. In the process, she creates an intensely sensuous and emotional exploration of motherhood - its pleasures, failures, irritations, griefs and joys. She is confronted by the illusion of control and by the random mystery of things, the chance of it all, and desperately hopes chance will deliver her child back to her.
Patti Miller is a writer and teacher who lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. After teaching general writing classes for many years, Patti discovered how many people wanted to write their life story and designed workshops especially for them. Her first book, Writing Your Life grew out of those workshops and brought to a wide audience the techniques and skills which have inspired Patti's students. The Last One Who Remembers shows what is possible if a writer continues to explore their craft in this way.