Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

it an ordeal to speak up in tutorials. I might have gone through the year in silence if it hadn’t been for the only-in-Australia custom of some of the younger tutors, who liked to hold their tutorials in the beer gardens of the various pubs near the uni. I soon found that a swiftly downed boiler-maker made it possible for me to barge into any discussion without inhibition. Because of Australians’ cultural acceptance of drinking—even of drinking to excess—it never occurred to me to question what I was doing.

But even with the alcohol buffer, the university became bleaker as the seasons changed. In late summer, when the lawns were still covered with clusters of students laughing together or arguing over their books, I had been able to imagine myself eventually becoming part of such a group. But as the cooler weather drove the students inside and rain stripped the foliage from the sycamores, I wandered alone from class to class over the slick, blackened leaves and despaired of ever finding a friend.

“Snap out of it! You don’t know how lucky you are.” My mother, the voice of reason, had little patience with my moroseness. “When I was a kid I was so shy I didn’t just have trouble speaking to strangers—I used to cross the street so I wouldn’t have to say hello to people I knew.” My mother had dealt with her shyness by getting a job in radio, where she spoke to thousands of strangers at a time. Her prescription was simple: find the thing you are most afraid of, then go and do it.

I was afraid to be noticed, to speak up in public. The last time I’d visited Darleen in Melbourne, she’d had a photographer friend from the advertising agency take some nice pictures of me. So, looking for an antidote like my mother’s, I made an appointment with a Sydney casting agent, to see if I had any chance of getting work as an extra in commercials or TV shows. Within a few weeks I had more jobs than I could handle.

Instead of moping around the campus in between classes, I sped off to shoots all over the city. I played a biker’s moll (in a bad movie called Sidecar Boys), an eighteenth-century French aristocrat (in an ad for ice cream), a mountain climber (Deep Heat liniment), a dancing groupie (Bacardi and Coke) and—my favorite role—a steer-roping, canoe-racing nun (in a TV comedy called “Flash Nick from Jindavik”).

These jobs gave me the nerve to audition for a tiny part in a production by SUDS, the Sydney University Dramatic Society. At the first rehearsal I glimpsed a tall blond in white overalls wandering around discussing lighting and props. He was the stage manager. Someone introduced us, and when he smiled at me it was like the sun coming out. Trevor was an architect, designing buildings for the government by day, studying for his degree at night.

Being in love made everything easy. The Gothic buildings of the university once again looked beautiful instead of daunting, and by September, as the weather warmed, I was sprawled on the sunny lawn, laughing with my friends from the drama society.

With everything going so well, it became hard to write to Joannie. I didn’t want to dwell on how good my life was, when hers was still so precarious. And yet if I didn’t tell her what I was doing it left very little to say.

Her replies were warmly enthusiastic. “Twenty years from now I will be able to boast that I possess a piece of correspondence from the world-renowned actress Geraldine Brooks!” she joked when I wrote to her about my jobs as an extra. During her college vacation she was working at the local swimming pool snack bar. “The work keeps me busy, which is important, and it’s generally fun.”

But the battle with her weight continued. “I was down to 69 lbs. but that was about a month and a half ago … now I’m up to 74 and feel much better.”

I had to get out a calculator and work out her weight in kilograms before I could make sense of this. I weighed forty-five kilos, or a hundred pounds. At thirty-three kilos, she was twelve kilos lighter than I, and yet she was three inches taller. (She’d gained height in the years we’d been writing to each other; I was stuck at my twelve-year-old stature, five feet two and a half inches.)

“I still don’t want to gain weight, which I know is irrational, and my whole family is desperately concerned about me because like at 74 lbs. I’m a walking health hazard—the least germ caught could mean curtains—plus I may be doing permanent damage to myself, plus I look like a walking skeleton, but all this just doesn’t make me able to see the light.” She wrote that she was eating three good meals a day and a bedtime snack, so was metabolizing more or less normally. But depression continued to hit her hard from time to time, and occasionally she heard voices.

She wasn’t able to keep the weight she’d gained. By September she’d dropped to sixty-eight pounds and once again needed hospitalization. This time she went to Texas, to a leading doctor in the field of eating disorders. Within six weeks she was up to ninety-seven pounds and also had gained, she wrote, “a lot of insight and resolve.”

But that dissipated quickly once she left the protective environment of the hospital. Unable to stand her situation at home, she moved in with her older brother in Boston. She had found a therapist and a job as a nurse’s aide in a convalescent home, but “was getting more and more depressed, and finally one night I overate, felt really suicidal, and ended up in the psych ward of Mt. Auburn Hospital for five weeks.” She spent Christmas at her brother’s on a day pass, and was discharged December 30.

Her first letter of 1975 came from a halfway house in