No dancing in the lift by Mandy Sayer
No dancing in the lift is a memoir written by Mandy Sayer the multi-award winning Sydney-based Australian author; recipient of honours including the Vogel Award, the National Biography Award and The Age Book of the Year for Non-Fiction. No dancing in the lift follows Dreamtime Alice in the time-line of the memoir of Sayer's life. While Dreamtime Alice focuses on Sayer's time in New Orleans and New York busking on the streets with her jazz drummer father Gerry Sayer, No dancing in the lift focuses on the final weeks of her father's life. Sayer is an unflinching memoirist, writing vivid emotional detail into the memories of those specific time periods of her life.
Sayer constructs her memoir as a series of vignettes. All are written in first person narrative voice providing the reader with direct access to Sayer's thoughts, feelings and experiences. She narrates past events from the time of her father's diagnosis with flashbacks to her early childhood, the later times travelling and performing with her father in America and the years of living in the Sydney Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and The Rocks area up to and including her father's final days. Set in Sayer's hometown of Sydney, at the time of the new millenium, the haunts of the artistic and musical community are vividly described.
Regularly the narrative breaks into direct long conversations with her father where Sayer calls him "You" and refers to herself as "I". It takes awhile for the reader to settle to these narrative shifts as well as to regain composure after the unsettling story of childhood exposure to a wild, outrageous, fast-living, hard-drinking, drug-taking life. Gerry Sayer lived for himself. He lived for drumming and was a reckless, unreliable father figure. He chose one child over the others and that was Sayer herself. Sayer learned to tap dance and lived her life for her father right to his end. Sayer describes a disturbing childhood with her hard-living father and her beautiful alcoholic mother. Betrayals and infidelities made for a precarious family life lived around all-nighters, music bars and pubs. Very intimate anecdotes are shared. Sayer, with light strokes, reveals a terribly difficult childhood and careless, neglectful parenting eg. when she was thrown to the wolves like Little Red Riding Hood (being sent to get a hamburger in downtown Kings Cross at night). Despite this and perhaps because of this, Sayer developed the resilience, intuition, and street smart ability to read people and situations that has enabled her to become a memoirist and write so clearly of the joy and heartbreak. Later as her father becomes ill, Sayer writes with unflinching candour about life lived in the shadows of terminal illness. Sayer's account of Gerry Sayer's later life as his health declined is clear-eyed and scorchingly honest. The stark realities of the minutiae of everyday life - the moments and memories as described by Sayer will resound with anyone who has gone through caring for a parent in the last stages of life and palliative care.
While Sayer tracks the relationship with her father another story develops concurrently. Sayer's love life has been fraught but a true love story slowly evolves in the exact same time period of her father's decline. Love and joy exist alongside grief.
Funny and sad, No dancing in the lift is a bold, brave, no holds barred memoir which cannot help but elicit a powerful emotional response in the reader.
Themes: Love, Palliative care, Sydney Arts scene in the early new millennium, Unconventional childhood, Poverty, Addiction, Mental illness, Infidelity, Drugs.
Wendy Jeffrey