Before I Forget

Before I Forget is the second volume of memoirs by well-known painter, feminist and writer Jacqueline Fahey. In her first volume, Something for the Birds (AUP, 2006), Fahey described her childhood in Timaru and bohemian life as an art student. ‘With this richly detailed and warm-toned memoir, Fahey looks set to be Timaru’s Turgenev - with a sprinkling of Irish pepper,’ Michael Morrissey wrote. Before I Forget kicks off after her marriage to the celebrated psychiatrist Fraser McDonald and recounts Fahey’s battles against conventional society to shape a life as an artist as well as a wife, a writer as well as a mother. She describes life in New Zealand and Australian mental hospitals and art schools; friendships with Rita Angus and Eric McCormick; an account of the art scene in New York in 1980; and a run-in with Titewhai Harawira at Carrington Hospital. Hilarious, opinionated, fiery, the book is held together by the inimitable voice of a fiercely original and nonconformist storyteller.