First days of October

An Octopus in my Ouzo, my new book, was sent to the publisher for the deadline of 1st October. Soon I'll get input from an editor, and last week I got a glimpse of the gorgeous cover design. If all goes well, the book will be out next April. 
In the meantime, after a rainstorm in late September that turned alleyways into rivers for a day - and resulted in some dramatic moments in Livadia harbour when a boat was submerged and had to be rescued - the weather has turned perfect. Nights are cool, good for sleeping; by day we have hot sunshine and warm sea, but it's cool enough for walking. And the first green leaves of winter are appearing.

    

The Good Greek Girl, Maria Katsonis

I'm restraining myself from writing tales from Tilos here so I can finish my new book; I thought I'd post this in the meantime about a book I read in Australia.

Maria Katsonis grew up in the 1970s in the Greek community in Melbourne, Australia. Above her parents' milk bar, she shared a bedroom with her yiayia, her grandmother. Her father used to make tzatziki by straining the yoghurt in an adapted singlet hanging in the shower. A good Greek girl, she went to university to study economics.

It was then that she discovered she was attracted to women, not men. She abandoned the economics degree for a career in theatre. Summoning the courage to come out about being a lesbian to her family, she met with violence from her father and ostracism from her family and the community. She was sent away from home and had no choice but to embrace a new independence. Gradually, she left the theatre for arts management and then public service in the government. As a mature student, she graduated from Harvard with a Masters.

Then, her mother had a stroke. The good Greek girl cared for her mother until she died, then stayed at home to look after her father until his death too. It led to a complete mental breadown and a serious episode of depression during which she was hospitalised. When she was finally well enough to go back to work, she realised she was uncomfortable hiding the truth, colluding with the secrecy of mental illness. Talking to colleagues about depression, she was astonished by the outpouring of stories and she started to write a book.

But a second story started to creep into the book - that of what it meant to be a Greek daughter. Through the writing she began to see traits she had inherited from her parents: filotimo, the love of honour, from her father, and her mother's filoxenia and kefi.

She had connected with Greece on her third visit to the country at the age of thirty. 'I felt at home in modern Greece, a contemporary country that had moved with the times, unlike the cloistered Greek village of Melbourne.' Visiting her father's village, Lidoriki, in a mountainous region just north of the Gulf of Corinth near Delphi, she was impressed by her 70-year-old great aunt who rose at dawn to bake the bread daily and had no qualms about slaughtering a goat or chicken from the yard for a feast.

On her fourth trip, as she was coming to the end of writing her story, the tzatziki at the taverna reminded her of how her father used to make it, and she found out she knew relatives of the taverna owner back in 'Afstralia'. 'I was now part of the village's history like my father.'

Maria is a senior executive in the Victorian government and an advocate with the Australia Council for Mental Health. She is a good Greek girl, 'just an unconventional one'. Her book, The Good Greek Girl, was published by Ventura Press earlier this year.

It's almost scary when you get what you wish for

It’s almost scary when you get the things you wish for. Maybe I should have been thinking bigger. World peace? Johnny Depp? But I had no time for Johnny right then...

Elizabeth Gowing has a knack for making what might seem a fairly esoteric story into a gripping read. Her first book was about an interest in honey-making in Kosovo. For her next, Edith and I, she followed in the footsteps of an Edwardian lady traveller in the region. And when I first started reading this new story, The Rubbish-Picker's Wife, about an unlikely friendship with a rubbish-picker’s wife in a minority Muslim Roma community in Kosovo, I did wonder for a moment whether it was a step too far into obscurity. Yet before long, thanks in part to her lovely writing style, I was hooked.

Gowing, a trained teacher, had been living in Kosovo for four years and was working with NGOs and international charities when she first visited Fushë Kosovë, where people lived in shacks surrounded by mud. She was there to offer a few bags of equipment which might be useful for families in need – most of them earned their money by scavenging through rubbish for recyclables. When a woman asked for money to buy medicine for her son, Elizabeth walked away. But she didn’t get very far. Soon she learned that none of the children in the community were attending school, mostly through a systemic prejudice among the majority Albanian population against people of Ashkali background. Slowly, she began to find a way to help these children to an education.

I was reminded along the way of the challenges I faced when trying to set up English sessions for the kids on our little Greek island – how exhausting it was setting it up with a lack of resources, but knowing that unless I did, they couldn’t progress. Funnily enough, then it was an Albanian family, a minority on a Greek island, whose child would have struggled to get to classes if I hadn’t been able to take him with me. I was also reminded of the sense of responsibility, and all the mistakes I made trying to do this in my first year of trying to integrate into island life, when Gowing wrote:

I had the same sense I had with speaking Albanian, that as I blundered through these foreign structures, although I could generally make myself understood I must be causing sensitive listeners to flinch repeatedly as I got things wrong, broke rules, and transgressed in ways I wasn’t even aware of.

As I followed her ups and downs in trying to get a schooling project off the ground, then building it into a sustainable organisation, the children’s enthusiasm for learning was a joy to read. It was no easy task to keep these kids in school when their families were used to sending them out to work to help put food in their mouths. But when the officials stopped finding excuses and started helping, it was clear that something significant had been achieved.

It was interesting to me to read that baklava is a Kosovo treat too, and what they call burek is so similar to spanakopita. That part of the Balkans was part of the Ottoman Empire just like Greece. There were more connections to my Greek life in this book than I’d foreseen, and I was pleased I’d had an opportunity to read this about this unlikely friendship.

The Rubbish-Picker's Wife was published this summer and is available on Kindle and Amazon and from bookshops.

http://www.rubbishpickerswife.com/

Photo by Dorit Hoffmeister