Last dance: Goodbye my beloved father, hello everlasting love
Award-winning novelist Mandy Sayer’s third memoir is a courageously frank and intimate love letter from a daughter to her father and a wife to her husband.
Mandy Sayer’s father Gerry lived life to the beat of his own drum kit.
A restless spirit who valued the oddball calm derived from choosing creative freedom over a life of suburban satisfaction, the talented jazz drummer was an unconventional dad, a precarious parent – often absent, somewhat self-absorbed and repeatedly prone to a messy personal life.
Yet despite his many shortcomings, Sayer’s bond with her father – her friend – remained wondrously close and loving, ‘til the end.
In her third memoir, No Dancing in the Lift, Sayer recounts her dad’s later life at the end of the millennium as he dies from cancer.
And while this is a love letter to her father, as her dad slips away what unfurls is the beginnings of new love, a lasting love – and one encouraged by her dad – between Sayer and her good friend (now-husband), the author and playwright Louis Nowra.
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Sayer employs personal journals, medical records and newspaper clippings in her pragmatic approach to piecing together a memoir that brims with joy and devotion.
The story unfolds over the final year of her 78-year-old dad’s life, mostly in his flat, her neglected Sydney Kings Cross apartment and a nearby hospice.
Memories of her Irish dad’s outlandish tales are intertwined with the present – a cocktail of jazz jam sessions and all-night parties washed down with copious amounts of alcohol and a constant supply of freshly rolled joints.
As Sayer reminds us, one of her dad’s favourite sayings was: “I’m here for a good time, not for a long time.”
Why the book’s title? It’s what Sayer and Gerry would say, then do, when entering a lift together. A reflection on their rule-defying temperament, sprinkled with joy and humour:
“For years after your death, I searched for the film that had inspired our habit of defying rules and tap dancing in lifts … the only movie that comes close to your description is Thoroughly Modern Milly (1968), starring Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, who live in a 13-floor hotel … The lift is always malfunctioning, and the only way anyone can make it work is to tap vigorously until it begins to move, and to keep on dancing until the correct floor is reached.”
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Of course, after Gerry’s diagnosis, neither feel like dancing in the lift. Cancer treatment alters Gerry’s normally easy-going temperament. Sayer must navigate his “arsehole behaviour” while managing to remain his steadfast support. It becomes clear that Sayer’s care for her father is uncompromising – even giving him her satin dressing gown because it would drape softly over his paper-thin skin.
Sayer doesn’t whitewash the dysfunctionality of her family – her siblings, her mother Betty’s descent into alcoholism – the poverty, addiction, mental illness, infidelity and drug use. Still, Sayer’s love for her father shines through. In tandem with this, new love blossoms as Sayer’s friendship with Nowra evolves:
“This man now had a distinct advantage over me: If he read Dreamtime Alice, he knew that I’d had my first orgasm when I was nine years old, while listening to you and Betty make love; how I was conceived after you’d swallowed a block of hash; how I’d once had an affair with a dwarf …”
An award-winning novelist and non-fiction author, Sayer’s prose is easy on the ears, its jazz-like rhythm changing with the mood – the joy and deep emotions alternating as the story unfolds.
No Dancing in the Lift will resonate with anyone experiencing the grief of caring solely for a dying loved one. And it will touch a chord with daughters reconnecting to memories shared with their own dads.
It all makes for a rollicking read and, as a result, I’ll be hunting down copies of Sayer’s award-winning Dreamtime Alice (1999), which recounts a twentysomething Sayer tap-dancing alongside her jazz drummer dad when busking in New York and Orleans; and Velocity (2005), which delves into Sayer’s youth.
No Dancing in the Lift by Mandy Sayer, is published by Transit Lounge, $32.99.