Journey Around My Mother

I’m stumped. As a former journalist, writer, and now psychologist, I wonder why my book I know only happy people: Memoirs of a psychologist seems to have made some people unhappy.

When the book was released nationally in June, I was visiting my daughter in Brisbane. It was there that I noticed that Whitcouls had censored the cover on their website.

The cover is taken from a photograph that hangs in one of the most famous galleries in Vienna, the Albertina. I was in Vienna shortly after Covid. My husband took a photograph of this widely published and famous image in Austrian photography. It is in the public domain and can be freely copied.

I love the photographer’s use of form and light, as well as the sense of mystery, sensuality and perhaps impending death. This is an ideal composition that creates an appropriate fairy-tale atmosphere. He asks questions that require answers that we can only give uncertainly. Psychology is a bit like this.

Photo, Bewegungsstudiewas made by Rudolf Koppitz in 1927. He was best known for his use of the nude human figure. However, almost 100 years later, it clearly bothered some New Zealanders.

The cover shows three women dressed in black supporting a naked woman, possibly the dying swan from Swan Lake. These are dancers from the Vienna State Opera. Nude ballerina? Whitculls turned off the naked woman.

I couldn’t believe it. My distributor contacted Whitcouls and the cover photo was uncensored. But in many bookstores the book is difficult to find – not exactly under the counter, but it may well be.

The owner of a women’s bookstore in Oakland seemed to take issue with the cover photo. She told me that it bothered her, although she didn’t mind naked women. When I visited the store, there was no sign of a book on the shelves.

I’m not surprised the book is selling in Melbourne. At Readings bookshop on Lygon Street, Carlton liked the cover and may have bought the book because of it. It’s a different story, alas, in New Zealand. It’s not on the NZ Booklovers website. I was told that the reviewer found the book “too dark” and “not uplifting enough.”

I thought New Zealand had matured since Germaine Greer was arrested and fined for nonsense at Auckland Town Hall. I wonder what the people of Vienna would think if they knew what happened to my memoirs and one of the most famous photographs? I also wonder what my mother, the writer and publisher Dame Chris Cole Catley, would say about it.

Auckland writer Graham Lay was a close friend of my mother. She published her first novel Mentor. I was worried about what he would think since my memoir was critical of my mother; I didn’t love her for most of her life. I always loved her and needed her, but she just wasn’t there for me. Graham wrote to me: “Although this is not a happy story, it is unflinchingly honest and very well told.”

My book focuses on mental health issues, my own and my clients’, and in particular attachment disorder – what can happen to you in life if your brain structure is affected by abuse, neglect and trauma in the first three years. life in particular.

It’s also about discovering the Maori world in search of the father I never knew, and my complicated relationship with my mother. I was expected to become a journalist like her from an early age. I felt that her love for me depended on my becoming a writer, and so I did. At age 14, I wrote a biweekly column called “Suzie’s Teenbeat” for Is it true newspaper. It included record-breaking reviews of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, as well as the newspaper’s scandalous stories of adultery, messy divorces and fraud.

Later I worked as a journalist in Melbourne. Ageand then Hong Kong Television and BBC Radio in London. It was only when I became a psychologist that I felt free from my mother’s influence.

I wonder if my mother, who has published over 140 books, would have published my memoirs? I think she would do it.

I know only happy people: Memoirs of a psychologist Sarah Beck (CopyPress, $33) is available at select bookstores. This is the memoir of a clinical psychologist who writes about overcoming despair both in herself and in her clients. She also writes about her relationship with her mother, Dame Chris Cole Catley (1922–2011), who ran Cape Catley Books in Marlborough Sounds and then Devonport for 25 years.