.”
What started out as an account of her mother’s decline soon broadened, she says.
“… my distress about Mum’s distress wouldn’t make any sense unless I explained the cause of her distress, that before she was even diagnosed, she was feeling herself failing, and she was in a desperate state of worry about my older sister.”
She then came to understand how distressing her sister Jo’s struggles were for her, she says.
“I realised how difficult it was for me to try to get involved in my sister’s life and how little I wanted to do that because of the things that occurred in childhood.”
It was a childhood scarred by sexual abuse. Knox was abused by her elder sister Jo. Her younger sister Sarah was abused by a predatory neighbour.
She had written about the abuse in a “very quiet, minimised way” in her autobiographical novellas Tawa and Paremata, she says.
At signings for those books, women approached her about their own experiences, she says.
“But in at least 10 cases, women came up to me who had been abused by the same man who abused my sister.
“They waited at the end of the line, and they leaned close to me and they whispered.
“And it was the fact that they waited and that they whispered just told me everything about where we are with this stuff. Waiting, whispering.”
The 67-year-old writer – author of 14 novels for adults and young adults, an essay collection, and three autobiographical novellas – was by her mid-20s “determinedly walking away” from her childhood trauma, she says.
“I thought, well, time is passing and I will get better. But as my life went on, I realised once I became a wife and a mother and so on, I realised exactly how badly damaged I had been by that. And there was no walking away from it.”
Knox writes in Night, Ma that she’s never not loved Jo.
“She was incredibly formative for good and ill. And she was charismatic and enchanting and very strange, very, very peculiar.”
As well as her “oddities and charm” Jo couldn’t tell when someone was frightened or suffering, Knox says, something she learned to cope with as a child.
“What I think you do is you decide that you have to watch carefully and try and protect yourself and, in my case, protect my younger sister.”
The horror run of events was like “crossing flooded rivers”, she says.
“It was like you have to get out of somewhere because you don’t have enough supply. So you have to keep finding a way across the next river. And that’s really pretty much what it was like.”
Wellington-born Knox also writes about about the death of her brother-in-law, Duncan in Night, Ma.
Her publisher husband, Fergus Barrowman, took two devastating phone calls, she says, first to learn that his brother had died and secondly that it was through an act of violence.
“Your understanding of the world changes the moment you have someone who you care about, who dies by violence.”
This part of the memoir was more detached, she says.
“My good decision was to take the night in which Duncan died and take the witness testimony from the trial, but not put it as the testimony, put it as an eye of God on that night, the events of that night. Because the trial was the first time that the family heard what had really happened.”
She recorded courtroom testimony at the Rarotonga trial on her iPhone, she wanted to record what happened for Duncan’s children, she says.
“I wanted to get it right, for when they were old enough to explain it to them.”
Writing the memoir hasn’t been a neat and tidy exercise in closure, she says.
“The more I consider how I feel now, the more bewildered I am. So that’s the answer for now, I think. This is a report from at this point, but I’m very glad that I did write it.
“I’m glad because I really wanted to reach out to people who have family members with motor neuron disease or who have died by violence or who have family members with mental illness or people who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse.
“I want those things to be able to be discussed without the people who’ve gone through them thinking that if they open their mouth and start talking, they’re the plague ship, that has to stay away from other ships.”
Where to get help
Help
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Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO . This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends.
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111 .
