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The heart-wrenching but triumphant story of rebuilding a life and a family
'My body, suddenly, carries two stories of loss … One is easy for people to recognise. My mother died of cancer. I watched her age twenty-five years in eight weeks … My other story marks me as different. It is more silent and more savage, it is not pure and no one knows how to approach it. Somewhere I lost my husband.'
When Maggie's vibrant young husband, father to a five-year-old daughter and an unborn son, dies tragically, Maggie is left widowed and due to give birth three months later to their second child.
Then her beloved mother, backbone of the family, mother to three children, grandmother to two, dies suddenly of aggressive cancer. In two short years, Maggie's life has shattered.
After a year, she gives up trying to juggle single motherhood and the demands of an academic career and returns with her children to the family farm in central western New South Wales to take stock and catch a breath.
The farm becomes a redemptive, healing place for Maggie and her children as they battle the heat and drought that only the Australian landscape can offer. She throws herself into the horses, sheep, ducks and chickens and slowly, finally, realises she has found a new shape for herself.
Written by a brilliant new talent,
When It Rains is a meditation on grief and the vagaries of the human condition, and a stunning memoir about piecing back together a life, and moving forward, one step at a time.
Reading Group Book Questions
- Many of the recurring motifs throughout the memoir work as both portents of danger and signifiers of transformation and hope. What are some of these motifs and how successfully does their doubled burden of meaning express the push and pull of grief?
- The experience of grief is both a universal emotion and a uniquely personal journey. How effectively does this memoir articulate your own private grieves?
- Discuss the use of dreams as a narrative device.
- The author seeks connections to others experience of grief through words. How useful do you think reading about other people’s experiences are to understanding your own?
- How important is the body as both a receptacle for, and an expression of, the author’s grief? Do you relate to this?
About The Author
Maggie MacKellar was born in 1973. She has published two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada. She now lives in central western New South Wales with her two children.
