Every day go back to the beginning and rewrite the whole thing and when it gets too long, read at least two or three chapters before you start to write and at least once a week go back to the start. Earnest Hemmingway.
Many years ago I ploughed my way through Nassim Taleb’s weighty tomb “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.” The book is full of interesting insights and ideas – many of which are pertinent to our times (no government has ever promoted resilience because governments by their nature promote dependence) – but, the thing I remember most about the book was a few sentences early in the book where Taleb defended his option to reject any suggestions made by the book’s nominal editor. After reading that paragraph my mind continually returned to rub against the notion that Antifragile would have been a much better book with more editorial input.
Grace Tame’s memoir, “The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner” is such a book, but more so. Tame’s book is chaotic, confusing, and contradictory. In other words, it is a book in desperate need of editorial input. Compared to Tame’s book, Taleb’s Antifragile is written with the precision of an Earnest Hemmingway novel; the author who famously wrote 47 different endings to “A Farewell to Arms” and was known for his stringent rewriting process.
The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner was nominated for a number of book prizes in 2023, but, thankfully, won none. This is not a denigration of Tame, but a reality that the book is very poorly written, difficult to read and requires dedication to get through. Even Tame’s most ardent fans – she is broadly supported by left wing Australia – found the book a challenging read and many readers fell into the DNF (did not finish) category. This is almost unheard of on the solidly left wing Good Reads platform where anything right of Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” gets a one star review.
I did not read the book, I listened to the audiobook version. Although I am good at sticking with heavy reads – I was engrossed by Niall Ferguson’s “The War of the World,” a heavy read at well over a thousand pages - and I read dozens of non-fiction books a year, Tame’s book is too discursive, too wandering, and too tangential to sit and read. Listening allows the “reader” to do other things and is simply the only way I could get through the book.
Tame’s story is well known in Australia so there is no need to repeat it here. The book traces the period of her life from birth through to winning the Australian of the Year Award in 2021 which, at times, feels too revealing, too nakedly honest. I’m not sure that the reader really needs to know about all of Tame’s later sexual encounters, or the drug taking, drinking, cutting, general chaotic nature of her life before and after what she calls “disclosing.”
Dispassionate readers have to wonder whether the chaos which seemed to permeate Tame’s life was a precondition to the abuse or a reaction. The book is so disordered and chronologically disjointed that it is impossible to tell. In “Troubled: A Memoir of FosterCare, Family and Social Class,” Rob Henderson (well known for his thesis on “luxury beliefs”) writes about the chaos that characterised his own upbringing and acknowledges that the leading indicators of success in life are relatively simple: marry before having children, finish high school, work full time. Tame’s life is nowhere near as destabilised as Henderson’s. She had loving and caring parents (albeit they were separated) and a large and supportive family network all in close proximity. Despite claims in the book that her background was somewhat impoverished, both parents had good jobs, the family had multiple properties, there were overseas trips and no apparent physical or emotional neglect and certainly no economic barriers. The abuse, in fact, occurred at a prestigious private girls school in Tasmania.
There is a sense throughout the book that Tame at one time both resists being cast merely as a victim of crime and yet finds comfort in various psychosocial diagnoses: autism, neurodivergence, ADHD, cutting disorder, anorexia nervosa (her words, and not the modern nomenclature now in use) which allow her to enter the now sacrosanct category of victim. Many of the experiences she describes as being evidence of one or all of these various issues appear to outsiders less caught up in their own mental torture and with the benefit of more life years to be the normal ups, downs, and round-abouts of any individuals life. No-one really fits in, we all struggle with our identity, making and keeping friends is difficult (although Tame, for all her psychosocial and autistic issues seems to fare much better than most in this regard), and, although these things get easier with age, they never disappear. At 60 we can be as fraught with self-confidence issues as we are at 16. Such is life, and it is made no better by the modern tendency to rumination fostered by therapy and endless affirmations of completely normal personality variations.
There is no doubt that Tame was failed by the system. When the grooming started, Tame was under treatment for disordered eating so she was seeing therapists and her mother had met with the school and requested that Grace never be alone with the abuser. The red flags were there but somehow Grace remained enmeshed with her abuser for six long months. This is both an indictment of the system and a sign that we should never trust strangers – no matter what position they hold in society – to be the carer for our vulnerable people. No therapist can replace the love of actual family and there is something dystopian about the way modern society appears to believe that various professionals (I use the term loosely) know better than we know ourselves. We should all be less gullible.
The book lumbers along under heavy prose with far too many adjectives (and randomly inserted expletives although I like a good expletive myself) often stacked one upon the other as if the author had one hand on the keyboard and the other on the thesaurus as she typed. There is a general sense, amidst much self-deprecation, that Tame is trying to convince the reader of her intellect by using the longest words and most arcane language available. Many times I was reminded of Orwell’s famous advice for writers “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
Part of the difficulty of the book is that Tame frequently wanders off into random political discourses almost all of which fall solidly within the left leaning frame of reference and are delivered with both conviction and venom. One feels that her opinions are less well thought out and more the repeating of tropes held dear to the hearts of the (almost) communist left. Many of these are simply wrong. For example, she claims that America has no social safety net or public health care, while the reality is that the USA spends trillions of dollars on social welfare programs; a greater percentage oftheir GST than Australia spends (which is a big spender on social welfare programs). True, there is more economic disparity in the USA than in Australia, but Tame is simply wrong about many things she presents as categorical facts.
In Australia, where we have a government instituted Minister for Men’s Behavior Change (an Orwellian position), Tames thesis is a message for our times. Men are bad, women are victims. Grace Tame was a victim and her abuser deserved more prison time (I’d happily see him live out his days in prison). The fact that he was released from prison and then garnered scholarships and funding from the Australian government to attend university is a slap in the face to all Australians and Tame is right to be angry about that. The problem is, that the leftist agenda that Tame vociferously supports is how we arrived at this point in Australian history where abusers are more deserving of compassion and care than victims. Intersectionality works both ways and has enabled Machiavellian types to thoroughly game the system. The law of unintended consequences holds true even under the empathetic left, perhaps even more so as incentives go unrecognized.
Tame’s great contribution to solving the problem of pedophilia, grooming and exploitation could have been explicating why some women and girls are so vulnerable to victimization by men. Unfortunately, there are no answers in this book. The nub of the issue, what was really in Tame’s consciousness over the months she was groomed and abused, is entirely hidden. I finished the book feeling that more was concealed than revealed by this purportedly bruisingly honest and authentic memoir.
Solving the problem has to be a two pronged approach. Men, obviously, have to stop committing crimes against women and girls, but we also need to understand what it is about females that makes them uniquely vulnerable to male predators. Unlike the mostly low socio-economic class white victims of the UK grooming gangs, Tame was not from a low income family or a child in foster care whom no-one really cared about. She was (and is) an intelligent strong and determined young woman from a loving and supportive family, with friends and hobbies, and sports she participated in. And yet she fell victim to a predatory teacher. Why was that? What programs or social norms are needed in society to give women and girls the necessary skills to recognise and avoid suffering the same fate as Tame? Because if women are as strong and adaptable as Tame posits (and I believe they are) then we need to activate those strengths to prevent this inexcusable cruelty and wanton destruction of potential. Relying on psychopathic predators to reform their behaviour is not enough. We need to arm vulnerable people, but most particularly women and girls with the skills to recognise evil.
