The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen by Krissy Kneen review – memoir as both fairytale and defiant truth
Thu 13 May 2021 18.30 BST
In the centre of a page without adornment, before the opening chapter of the book, a small paragraph might almost be overlooked: “When I was a child my family won the lotto and used the money to move to the middle of nowhere in central Queensland to make fairytale characters of papier-mâché.” It would be an outlandish set-up even for a work of fiction, let alone a memoir, but this small incredible opening is a speck compared to the extraordinary story that unfolds.
The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen is a story about finding freedom but equally about naming the things that shape us. Krissy Kneen’s grandmother – Lotty/Dragica/Mum – presides over her two daughters and two granddaughters with iron-fisted control, rejecting all of Kneen’s childhood attempts to learn about her past. Kneen grows up with a woman who wouldn’t tell strangers where she was born, who was frightened of anyone in authority, and who “encoded her childhood stories in weird myths and fairytales”.
As an adult, Kneen attempts to reconcile the gaps in the way she understands her own identity by journeying back, both physically and metaphorically, through her grandmother’s life. The book documents Kneen’s “mythic remaking of myself” as she attempts to construct an outline of her grandmother’s life (and make sense of her own) through place, myth and community. Kneen travels from Queensland to Ljubljana and then Egypt, tracing the details she knows, and filling in the blanks as she goes.
It is an act of defiance, this journey, this story, as Kneen takes her grandmother’s ashes away from their home in Queensland back to a birthplace that she had no desire to revisit. Her defiance and subsequent discoveries aren’t always welcomed by other members of her family, and Kneen is as transparent with these tensions as with every other part of the story, musing on how she might be expected to honour the stories they tell themselves, while staying true to her own need for understanding. “I am unpicking the tapestry of words my grandmother wove,” Kneen writes. “I am saving the thread. I am making a new cloth with it, one that weaves imagination into truth. Anastazija, Carlotta, Dragica. I have learnt the magic of storytelling from my grandmother and in my stories, like hers, there will always be the glittering threads of truth.” She honours the pact between reader and writer, signalling the transitions in the text without being heavy-handed, and the structure of the book serves more to gently buoy the reader along rather than offering any distinct separation between the various stages of the story.
Kneen’s writing is dreamlike in some ways, moving back and forth through time and space, at times imagining forgotten elements through fiction and at others offering sharp observations of documented fact. It requires a leap of faith on behalf of the reader – to follow the writer through this experiment without knowing entirely where it might lead. But the journey, for reader and writer both, pays the effort back in full. Kneen’s narrative is carefully, deliberately constructed, leaving no doubt that she is in control. Even when she dips into fictional imaginings of how her ancestors might have lived out their experiences, there is no doubting her skill, or her commitment to transparency with the reader. Kneen’s previous work – as a poet, a documentary-maker, and award-winning writer of memoir and fiction, including Wintering and An Uncertain Grace – appears in her writing and informs it. Those familiar with her work will be primed for her playful, thoughtful introspections and experimental structure, and those new to it will find it a welcome change.
A truly compelling memoir connects with something beyond the self, and Kneen uses her narrative to understand not only herself and the women who have come before her, but also, on a more fundamental level, what we are made of – how the micro-particles of our ancestors and their lives manifest in us, making our past inescapable although at times unknown. Kneen’s story examines the way we inherit our flesh and our fears, and the way we seek out and build communities or chosen families. Her body is a real, flawed constant throughout the novel, and it carries the truth of her journey in the aches and longings, and holds the readers’s trust within it.
Kneen’s writing offers legitimacy to poetry and fairytale as a kind of knowing – that both contribute to the ways we learn to understand who we are in the world. As much as she weaves imagination into truth, she weaves truth into imagination – the truth of our bodies, of our families, of our hearts. The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen is a generous, full-hearted, poetic attempt to understand the way we carry our ancestors within us, and how we might better know ourselves through knowing them.
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