Heather Rose woke from a dream fearing for her brother. Then police broke the news (2024)

Sometimes lives are so weird, events so extreme, that for a writer to transform them into fiction would render them unbelievable. Life, it seems, really can be stranger, as the saying goes, and Heather Rose’s is a case in point. As she puts it, “the notion of reality is not as fixed in my experience as it is for a lot of people”.

When she was at primary school, her beloved grandfather died not long after she had her daily lunch with him, but before she returned at the end of the school day. “Death can come really quickly,” she learns.

A year later, her brother, Byron, and her other grandfather die in a boating accident. That morning, she had dreamed that she was drowning and couldn’t keep her grandfather afloat. She woke convinced Byron would drown. Later, the police call round to break the news. “I made myself wrong for that for years,” she writes of her subsequent feelings.

But after the memorial service at Hobart cathedral, she goes up to her room, lies on her bed and there is Byron propping up the doorway. He tells her that he is all right.

Really?

“It was the most unexpected thing,” the Tasmanian writer says today. “It was just indisputable. He was standing in the doorway. He wasn’t solid, he was maybe 50 per cent solid. And the feeling that he emanated, that was the most compelling thing, the sense that it’s all right, you don’t need to be devastated by this; I’m okay.

“In a funny kind of way, that’s what sent me out into the world because I wanted to go and see if other people had experiences like this.”

But that is perhaps not the strangest thing she recounts in her memoir, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. There’s an alarming seance she conducts with her other brother; her time in a monastery on the Thailand-Laos border and a vision of millions of lights that she recognises as “us”; and her experience of a sweat lodge, a ritual purification from the culture of the indigenous North Americans that eventually leads her to an annual commitment over four years to an arduous, extreme “sun dance” in New Mexico (which she made use of in her first novel, White Heart).

There’s her involvement in a dance in the Central Desert in which she and her fellow dancers are felled by the eruption of some sort of energy, leaving several of them without their faculties for a few hours, some for days and months, and one in a psychiatric unit.

Already diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an intensely painful form of inflammatory arthritis that even now blights her life, Rose faces a worrying time when she gets pregnant. But one day “a tall dark-eyed, handsome man” is leaning against the wall of her office. She writes that he is not solid, but is very real. He astonishes her when he calls her Mum and tells her everything will be fine.

“I’d seen my brother Byron twice after he died. But this wasn’t a ghost,” she writes. “Could an angel appear in the form of my future son? I breathe slowly and nod.”

It’s understandable that Rose says she’s “excruciatingly nervous” about the book coming out. She started writing the memoir when she turned 50. She had been unwell and wanted to write her stories for her children. It turned into a vast book and her publisher urged her to leave out the stuff about food and family, and “the crazy travel stories” and concentrate on the spirituality element.

Today, nearly 10 years later, she says that of her books – five novels, including The Museum of Modern Love, which won the Stella Prize in 2017, and three for younger readers co-written with Danielle Wood – this was the most difficult to write.

“I hadn’t anticipated going back into the past is a process of re-traumatising,” she says. “I think the echoes from the incident with my brother and grandfather were so much more powerful than I could ever have imagined once I looked at all those threads. And it didn’t strike me at the time that a lot of those other things that I did that were very difficult and physically challenging were connected to that.”

As a young woman, the question driving her was: what is life? “I think deep seeking, always asking that question, what is life, and then the shadow of that is, of course, what is death? I think I saw things about myself where I’ve been dancing on sometimes a very slender tightrope between life and death on a number of occasions.”

After the drowning, she writes, grief turned the Rose family into “wounded animals”. Her mother left, her father moved out, and “by the end of year 12, I’m living in the house where we were once a family”.

Given that revisiting these things was retraumatising, had writing her memoir changed her? She says she feels more compassion for the young woman she was, the one who chose to make her way in the world in such a solitary fashion. And now, years later, she reckons that it’s all right to have good boundaries in her life, to know what works for her and what does not.

However, the experience of writing about herself as opposed to writing her fiction proved tricky. It’s a question of voice.

“Finding the voice is easy when you’ve got a character. They’re fun to play with and I love the visitation of characters into my life and living with them over the years that I’ve written a novel.”

Now she is working on a new novel using stories her family have told over generations of how they came to Tasmania six generations ago and what happened in Europe leading up to that. “And what I’ve loved about them is that most of them are completely untrue.”

While the Heather in her memoir became somewhat distant to her in the writing and editing process, there is no question that she and the author are not one and the same. “Of course it’s me; it’s me so acutely. It’s so me it terrifies me that the world will see that,” she says.

“But finding my own voice, finding who I was and what I wanted to share, that was also a process of liberation in its own way. I mean, it’s very much putting the past to rest. That’s one thing about memoir; I hadn’t expected that it felt like that.”

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I had assumed before reading Nothing Bad Happens Here that the title was ironic, but of course, I’m wrong. Before publication, she showed the cover art to a couple of young women who had never seen the title. “They both looked at it and went ‘ha ha, as if’. And a lot of people have had that reaction. I mean it very genuinely.”

One simple conclusion from the book is that she’s not afraid of death, probably never was. But Byron spells it out to her in another, much more recent appearance. Live every day, he tells her.

“I’ve never framed it like that for myself, but that’s exactly what I went about doing after his death, thinking that every day was a day that I had that he didn’t. And also don’t be afraid of death because I don’t know what happens beyond that. It’s clear that things are not as black and white as we might imagine.”

Read Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here and you’ll probably reach the same conclusion.

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is published by Allen & Unwin at $32.99.

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