John Purcell - Author
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1997 - 1999

In 1997 I began writing a series of short interlinked stories based loosely on the life I had experienced while living in Italy in 1991-92. I had fallen in love with an Italian girl who lived with her family in Milan. I lived with them for a short time. These stories contemplate the effect my disruptive presence had on these normally private people.

Work on these stories came to an abrupt halt when I decided to go to university. In the sample below I can see the effect Gertrude Stein's Three Lives had on my writing. Trouble is, Gertrude Stein was a genius and I am an idiot, so the result was writing which was just plain irritating.

Mara                                                                                                

In the kitchen Mara was setting the small white kitchen table for five. She completed this ritual without reflection. For twenty five years she had practiced this function. Mara’s mother had remembered that her mother had done the same and Mara had observed her mother laying the table. At table, while Mara’s mother and grandmother still lived and Mara was just a young woman, she had heard them reminisce about the chores they had done, about the food they had made and the many details of their lives as mothers and wives. They spoke about wedding feasts and Christmas meals, about new appliances and old cleaning remedies, about fresh food at markets and war time shortages. Important arrangements were discussed between the two older women while Mara, unable to leave, forbidden to leave, planned her future or dreamt about her future lover. 

Mara remembers those hours spent at the table on holiday afternoons fondly for those were hours she stole from her mother and grandmother. Those hours were idle in what was normally an active existence for the three women. The table having been cleared and the dishes having been rinsed and stacked, Mara’s mother would pour out the coffee for herself, her husband and her mother. Mara’s father would, on these holiday afternoons, leave the table and have his coffee on the lounge in the other room and listen to the radio broadcast of a football match. Mara’s mother’s life was as she thought it should be. Her husband was happy in the knowledge that his life was run smoothly and he seldom spoke a harsh word to any of the women in his household for in truth it was not his place to do so. Mara’s mother understood, manipulated and loved every detail of her household somewhat like Rome’s God was believed to take in every detail of Earthly existence. Mara’s mother was present, if not physically then mentally, everywhere within the walls of her home. She constituted her household. 

Then, the only space Mara was able to roam free in was a maturing self-knowledge which was a newly formed part of her adolescent mind. Mara was acutely aware that this fledgling self-knowledge she was nurturing had been laid upon the child her mother had reared her to be. Little by little Mara had carved out for herself a space for individuality within her own mind. From the vantage point of this immature self-awareness and individuality she became conscious of the difficulties she had managed to traverse and saw clearly those still waiting to be. The two main influences or better still, the two creators of her life, her mother and her grandmother, were so tightly fitted together that they appeared to form an impenetrable barrier which Mara saw, to her dismay, she, herself, was a part. The habits of her childhood, the routine of her adolescence, had bound her to her mother in ways she was not conscious of. The three of them had been grafted from the same domestic root and had grown consecutively one from the other regardless of the male influences in their lives. 

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