Book review: A Recipe for Family by Tori Haschka

(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)

You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at the messy clusterf__k that is modern society but people, by and large, like things neat and tidy.

While life by its very unpredictable nature is messily chaotic and rife with glorious inconsistencies, and humanity is more than a little prone to not having their collective ducks in the same room, let alone in a row, the pressure is on, personally and societally, to make it look like everything is pleasingly curated.

Aided and abetted by social media, which allows us to make the imperfect look like a masterclass in flawlessness, and a driving need to have it all together, at least when people are watching, we are hostages to tidying up the grotty edges, an impulse that sees the lead characters in A Recipe for Family by Tori Haschka desperately trying to appear as if they are the ones holding the golden ticket to an endlessly fulfilled and neatly manicured life.

The truth is, of course, far less clean and tidy, and much of the narrative in this wholly immersive, funny and thoughtfully empathetic novel is driven by the pursuit of the flawlessly unattainable which, surprise, surprise, never quite materialises in the way its meant to.

Centred on three women – marketing director Stella, who’s juggling a demanding career, two kids and an often absent, if loving, husband, her mother-in-law Elise, an industrial chemist who has some issues of her own to contend with, and eighteen-year-old Ava who’s in the midst of the life-changing grief of losing her mother and who has arrived in Sydney to be an au pair for Stella’s family – A Recipe for Family is a sagely moving lesson on how the messiness of life may in fact be where we should find ourselves more often if only because the truth of what it means to be human is often found there.

“… Before she made any other decisions, Elise needed a walk. And a swim.

She set off on her customary route and as she rounded the bend to see the golden expanse of Queenscliff and Manly Beaches in front of her, Elise felt her lungs expand a little and a weight start to lift.

It was the smell of the surf, the sight of the sea, the prospect of floating. She couldn’t always find the answer in these places, but at least here, she realised what questions she needed to ask.”

Of course, no one wants to be the one to discover that, or make that admission.

For a start, none of us want to be in that place where the wheels royally fall off and all the organisational charts, strict timetables and out ward declarations of “I’m fine” won’t save us, and that’s a powerful motivator to pretend everything’s on track when we manifestly know it’s not.

For the women of Sydney’s seemingly immaculate Northern Beaches, where money and privilege are second nature, the drive to be the perfect everything is neverendingly intense.

They must look the part, their children must look the part and every last shred of their lives must appear like it’s an Instagram shoot come to life, not a hair out of life, not a drop of sweat shed and no hint that everything is dangling off a cliff on the thinnest of barely supportive wires.

Admitting that you don’t have it all together is forbidden by some weird collective agreement and so people like Stella and her friends, some of whom may not be the kind of people you want around for the duration, soldier on, hoping they’ll make it over the line each night and live to fight another domestic day.

(courtesy official author site (c) Snippets Photography)

It’s exhausting in the extreme and Haschka does a superlative job of showing how the seams, already unravelling bit by bit, can be pulled conclusively and comprehensively apart, with just the smallest, or most cataclysmic, of events.

For a novel that bases much of its sage storytelling on the power of fabrication and sleight of hand, A Recipe for Family is unwaveringly honest, happy to put up its hand to say that perhaps honesty may be the best policy after all.

Certainly, while extracting the admission from them is like pulling teeth, when Stella and Elise both admit to major changes in their lives, changes they had very much tried to keep under wraps, there is a great amount of freedom that comes with it.

None of them knows at first, in the midst of their perfection frenzy, of course, and so they hamster wheel on, pretzeling themselves into ever tighter shapes in an attempt to have it all when everything may not be all its cracked up to be.

In fact, it’s highly possible that by trying not to have it all, that the things that really matter, that you really want, float to the surface, leaving the pretty dross of a thousand other unnecessary things at the bottom where they belong.

No one wants to be the guinea pig to find that out but in the end, it’s life being life, in all its frightening certainty, that finally forces their hand, changing life for all three women and helping them to see what really matters the most.

“He was coming home. She would make sure he would be there for a while. Georgie needed her father. Stella needed her husband. She just hadn’t been able to find the gestures or words to say it properly. She needed to feel his form against hers. They needed to find a way to be one again.”

Funny, wise and fuelled by a plot that manages to be emotionally intimate and expansively intense, A Recipe for Family cuts to the heart of what it means to be a modern woman, beset by a multitude of demands when all you really want is to be close to those for whom you care.

The driver for all these women is not the perfection they thought they needed, tantalising though that is and let’s face it, who among us doesn’t want a sparkly, shiny, perfect life (they look lovely, honestly), but the people close to them, and A Recipe for Family beautifully explores what that means and how finally discovering the primacy of that, when all the other stuff is stripped away, is liberating and enlivening.

It does, however, come at a great cost, as epiphanies, or even semi-epiphanies often do, and much of the novel looks at how Stella, Elise and Ava, and those in their orbit, try to hold off what they likely suspect deep down is inevitable but which none of them want to embrace until they absolutely have to.

As deep dives into the human psyche go, A Recipe for Family is superb – witty, thoughtful, alive with possibility and burdened by expectation, all of it tied together with a wise understanding, no doubt hard-earned, of what really matters in life and how the finding of that truth, difficult though it is, often doesn’t happen in the Insta-worthy moments but in those places where the tears fall, where hope hangs in the balance and where we find ourselves most vulnerable and truly human.

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