Reading Megan Dunn’s memoir The Mermaid Chronicles, Gabi Lardies ponders what the mermaids have to teach us about life.

The first time we meet Megan Dunn’s “funny little mother, with a penchant for purple,” Dunn has taken her for a birthday pampering at a spa. “I’ve let myself go,” her mother whispers, and then begins to weep. “It was true,” writes Dunn. “She had not been dieting and inhaling kale, she didn’t pluck her eyebrows to perfection, her face did not say ‘I’m proud to be me’.” Dunn’s view of her mother is both understanding and ruthless. She sees how her mother’s cheeks and neck are collapsed, her hair is short, she has no partner, no house, a low salary – nothing other than her daughter. Dunn watches her mother, “Her chin and lower lip wobbled, in that pathetic way I hated.”

Her mother is the opposite to the namesakes of the book – young, beautiful, sexy mermaids. Dunn, who turns 40 in the book, has been obsessed with mermaids pretty much her whole life. The Mermaid Chronicles documents a few years in her early 40s where she made this obsession into a research project. She had Skype dates with mermaids, went to a mermaid convention, a mermaid parade, an infamous mermaid bar, and bought her own mermaid tail – all documented. Refreshingly, The Mermaid Chronicles is not a collection of essays, a form that dominates literary nonfiction and Dunn’s previous work, it’s a fully-fledged quest. In choosing to write a narrative and its concerns right through a whole book, Dunn has reached beyond her previous books and taken a tight hold on being an established writer. She’s smart and observant, like all good writers, but best of all she’s funny, even when grappling with topics like middle age. 

I had a chuckle before the book even really started, at the contents page titled “Discontents”. This is the perfect introduction to Dunn’s wry writing style, and perhaps an indicator of what the book is really about, under the mermaid surface. I say this because I could have done with less mermaids, but this might be my fault for picking up a book called The Mermaid Chronicles when I have a pre-existing dislike for them (sorry). I do think adult women dressing up as mermaids is a phenomenon worth some sociological investigation, though that’s not quite what Dunn’s book does – it’s more of a tour of the mermaid landscape – an endless stream of working mermaids appear through Skype calls and in person visits. Dunn interviews them, with questions like “what do you eat?” and “are you a real mermaid?”. There’s also “do you think mermaids have to be beautiful?” But it’s Dunn’s mother, “sad, poor and desperate” in her little pink hat, and Dunn’s relationship with her, that captured me.

There’s a scene, early in the book, painted in unsparing strokes which had my heart hurting. Dunn visits her mum’s rented flat for the first time, something she tried to avoid because “it always depressed me.” The bricks on the exterior are “insipid” and it looked like “a dead-end”. Once we’re inside it gets worse. “The evidence of her attempts at optimism were all around me. Knick knacks. Floral aphorisms. On one windowsill she had the word ‘Nana’ spelt out in freestanding letters. A garish turquoise bookcase.” Ouch. Her mum’s taste, which we already understand through Dunn’s eyes as absolutely unsophisticated, becomes symbolic of the drudgery of mundane life and the non-fulfilment of dreams. “Her one dream in life had been to get married again and have a husband who loved her”. 

That banal ordinaryness is one which Dunn, who once aspired to be a famous artist and now aspires to be a famous writer, finds utterly depressing. It’s a devastating lens, which isn’t applied to other people – her father is instead compared to a lighthouse with “a strong bright mind”, his bookshelf full of “serious stuff” like Russian literature. Her partner, Rich, is seen as “a lean shadow, worn out from a job that he didn’t want to be doing, but was doing. Every. Single. Day.” Although his drudgery is seen, it’s observed without the pity. Mostly Rich is an elegant seahorse, loving and playful alongside Dunn.

For the first time in a long time, I didn’t find a woman writing about her mother a tired, over-treaded subject. I found it complex and nuanced. Dunn is especially attuned to life trajectories, dreams and failures. “In the eighties, as a little girl with buck teeth and red pigtails, I didn’t dream of growing up to be an arts project manager,” she writes. And yet there she is in an office, putting blown-out budgets into spreadsheets. And there is her mother, old and alone in a rented flat. While her mother liked the flat, Dunn “felt desperation under the seams of everything”. But Dunn is also chasing the mermaids. Hannah Mermaid, one of the world’s best known mermaids, tells her, “I got to live my dream”. The mermaid dreams swim over top of the narrative of her life, both pushing the story forward, providing narrative device, a foil, and in some sense, a distraction.

The Mermaid Chronicles by Megan Dunn ($35, Penguin NZ) is available to purchase from Unity Books. Read Megan Dunn’s essay about writing the book here.