Perhaps the biggest mistake we make when we talk about love is to think we are all talking about the same thing. While some might see love as a rom-com wedding finale, it’s more like a Zen koan: confounding, unsettling, and hopelessly open-ended. A koan works on us over time, asking more from us each time we encounter it. So does love. It takes courage to keep loving when the word is falling apart, and everyone seems to be against you. This is the journey of Maud, the protagonist of This is Where We Say Goodbye. When we meet Maud, she is in the middle of messing up her life while attempting to avoid the reality of the impending funeral of her favourite brother, Lloyd.
In a symphony of falling over herself, grieving Maud alienates her loved ones and finds herself surrounded by agents of chaos everywhere she goes. Every time there is a chance for her to face her grief front-on, she finds a way to escape reality, even if it means passing out. It seems like no one around her cares as much as she does or even wants to remember the real Lloyd. Finally, she encounters the one person who appears to be as torn apart about her brother’s death as she is. But is he who he seems, and how much does he know about how and why Lloyd died?
I suppose this doesn’t sound like a comedy, but it is. The humour in This is Where We Say Goodbye is in the observations of the little moments that break through the every-day. One of the characters Maud encounters is a woman at the local laundromat. Maud explains:
She budged closer and shot me a shy grin. I liked her even if she was breaking my heart bit by bit. I even liked her moustache. When I smiled back at her, she put her knees together daintily and half-turned them towards me and started to say something and then stopped. To be honest, I thought she was going to say how beautiful I was again and I don’t get compliments that much, so I was all ears. Instead, though, she looked sheepish and told me the ghost of Marilyn Monroe visited her. ‘Like to know what she told me?’ she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘She said: “show ’em all your stars, pet.”’’
It’s this character-driven humanity that McKenzie-Murray captures in This is Where We Say Goodbye. The broken beauty of a falling feather or an unsent letter. The loneliness of a suburban laundromat. The grief entwines with humour until you are laughing through tears as you read. We see the world through Maud’s eyes. She is unreliable, erratic, hopeless and disarming. She’s using the wrong words, getting on the wrong bus, and skipping her exams to sit in the toilet and read a National Geographic front to back. But haven’t we all been a complete mess when we lost someone we loved?
The fact is, grief and humour are twin sisters, living in the shadows of each other and swapping places until you don’t know which is which. If you really love, you will grieve. And amid the grief is the humour you never expected – the humour of recognising how precious it is to be alive, to have eyes to see, to have a heart that can break and a place to land when you fall, and how crazy it is that we ever forgot it.
If you like the humour of Miranda July, the characters of Mark Twain, and the mysteries of Raymond Chandler, you should read This is Where We Say Goodbye, and you should keep an eye on McKenzie-Murray as well, a writer who can express grief, love, and humour in ways that are relevant and recognisable to us today.
Shortlisted for the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award 2024, This is Where We Say Goodbye (Fremantle Press, 2026) can be purchased here.
Megan Kimber is a writer and musician based in Melbourne, Australia, inspired by ecosystems of all kinds and an obsessive reader. She studied literature and comparative religion at the University of Queensland. Her poetry has been published in Meniscus literary journal, and her new album will be released later this year at megankimber.bandcamp.com.
Website: https://megan-kimber.square.site/
