MEMOIR
Between Me and Myself
Sandra Willson; ed., Rebecca Jennings
Text, $34.99

Memoirs arrive as an understanding between autobiographer and publisher, a heart and soul looking for an audience. Here is the heart and soul of Sandra Willson, imprisoned in NSW jails for the longest time, brought to us by a documentary midwife the author never knew, British academic Rebecca Jennings.

The author of Between Me and Myself, Willson died in 1999, long before the book’s publication this year. Willson spent decades in prison after killing a taxi driver. The courts declared her insane and she was detained at the governor’s pleasure. It begins as a portrait of a teenager unloved and trying to find her way in the world, with a family completely unable to cope with her needs and desires. It ends as that young woman ages, trying to give back to the community that rejected her. Powerful and instructive for all of us.

Jennings stepped in as midwife where others had tried: so many advocated for Willson’s release, and also for the publication of her memoir, that it’s not possible to attribute the publication just to Jennings, nor would she want that. But it was her curiosity, her advocacy, her editing, that resulted in this book. Before her came the work of Women Behind Bars, of Anne Summers, of Wendy Bacon.

Jennings was the first in her family to go to university, secretly a lesbian until she left home to study at the University of Manchester. In her second year (after an unimpressive first year of studies), she discovered there was only one book on lesbian history in the university’s vast library. She made the decision to augment the collection with her own work, history and lived experience right there, despite obstacles along the way, including one academic who refused to counter-sign her PhD application because he considered her topic (and Jennings herself) immoral.

She finished the PhD, moved to Sydney for a few years and wrote Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History and during that project, whispers of Willson’s secret manuscript, written while she was in jail, emerged. Not long after Jennings gave a “first, speculative” talk at the State Library of NSW, news arrived the secret manuscript was real.

And real it is. This is the story of a young woman whose attraction to other women was medicalised and weaponised against her, a story of long-standing homophobia both within the prison system and outside it. This is also the story of Willson’s imprisonment, with its hardships and brief glimpses of warmth, and what happened after her release (it finishes before Willson becomes a consultant to long-running series Prisoner). Jennings has done a first-rate job of editing the book, true to the manuscript while providing excellent footnotes for clarification, using extensive official paperwork that existed because of Willson’s long-term institutionalisation.

At a time when lesbians were despised, those official records can’t be taken as gospel either. As Jennings puts it: “I was able to get a sense of what other people felt had been going on in these incidents that [Willson] was talking about.”