The Healing Party by Micheline Lee

A lot of people are making a lot of fuss about this book and on the strength of recommendations from Helen Garner, Annabel Crabbe and Leigh Sales, I bought it. I can see why they carried on about it: the story. It’s largely true I believe and quite an astonishing insight into what it’s like growing up in a Pentecostal Christian family, let alone a migrant one (if you’re a fan of Benjamin Law, and I am a mighty one, you’ll have read his story of growing up with his madly wonderfully crazy Chinese mother, which is both a comfort and a delight for people who have, shall I say, ethnically blended families). Anyhow, this story is good. It’s sad and shocking too, with the damage the crazy old father has inflicted on the writer-daughter something she’ll carry to her grave. I hope this book served as some sort of therapy for her. However, the writing is poor. I can’t say anything kinder about it. It’s the sort of unrestrained diary writing that a teenager plonks down on paper and then discovers twenty years later in the attic and cringes with embarrassment as she/he re-reads it. So my view: OK, interesting, funny, sad but definitely not great.