Gabrielle Carey (centre left) and Debra Adelaide (centre right). Debra Adelaide’s new novel, When I Am Sixty-Four, is based on her lifelong friendship with the late Gabrielle Carey – a fellow author she first met in primary school, and bonded with over reading. Best known as the teenage author of Puberty Blues, Carey was also a lifelong literary scholar – particularly of James Joyce.Adelaide has published novels and short-story collections since the mid-1990s and has won or been listed for significant literary awards. I was pleased – though also wary – to be invited to review this work of autofiction (a kind of fictionalised autobiography). Review: When I Am Sixty-Four – Debra Adelaide (UQP)Its focus is an account – no doubt partially true and partially invented – of her friend’s long mental illness, and her decision to end her life in 2023 at the age of 64, the age Carey’s own father had died by suicide. Debra and Gabrielle at her wedding. UQP I suspect the use of autofiction achieves, for author and reader, a double relationship with both the text itself and the reality of Carey’s death. It reports directly on real-life tragedy; but because it is difficult or impossible for readers to know what is true or imagined, a gap emerges in the reality. This gap, arguably, provides Carey with a degree of privacy and readers with a sense of the generalised sorrow of such a loss – but without picking over the bones of someone else’s life, and death.The book opens with the narrator visiting her friend’s house to find her still in bed, “the quilt smooth over the tiny lozenge of her frame”. This elegant description softens the impact of the spectre of her death, which haunts the margins even of the first page. So, though it opens with illness and loss, the story manages to avoid an overwhelming sense of gloom. It achieves this, I think, through the often exquisite use of language, in a tone that seems to express sorrow, but no real fear, in the face of death. This book is, after all, written by the author of The Household Guide to Dying, a novel that looks directly at death, and offers deeply, consolingly pragmatic suggestions for how to best deal with it. Debra Adelaide’s new novel is based on her lifelong friendship with Gabrielle Carey, who died aged 64. Gregory Ferris/UQP Touching, funny, ridiculousAdelaide’s approach here is, for the most part, both measured and compassionate. There are very touching and occasionally funny sections – scenes from memory, or instances of the ordinary and the ridiculous that inflect the lives being written here. There are deeply satisfying accounts of home maintenance, for example. Her friend’s home is cluttered, the letterbox is “rotted through and falling off its post”, the paintings and photographs are badly hung: all this is causing distress. The narrator takes charge and decisively installs a new mailbox, rehangs the artworks, tidies up drawers and rearranges the rooms. She is diffident about her skill, though. When her friend exclaims “You could have been an interior designer,” she responds: “I’m not good at it … It’s just that you’re very bad at it.” Threaded throughout are sections on writing, reading and teaching. This is hardly surprising, as both main characters, based on Adelaide and Carey, are writers, readers and teachers. Working together, they experience the frustrations of teaching creative writing in institutions of higher learning (or, as the Carey character terms it, “the creative writing gulag”). They swap books and discuss novels. Gabrielle Carey’s friendship with Debra Adelaide was rooted in a shared love of reading from the start. They describe “the sensual pleasure in words like petrichor”. They reflect on the volatility of the present tense when used as the main tense in fiction. They also have fun with the idea of coauthoring a book under the proposed title of Agony Author, a sort of A to Z on writing: A for Author, C for Covers, P for Publicity. This book was destined to “remain a chimera”, but I would love to see a copy: the sketches of planned entries are quirky and witty, and likely to be informative. There is no sentimentality here about the life of writing. Nor could there be, given that one of them is trapped in anxiety and depression, the other in distress about her friend’s inability to recover. The intractability of her illness appears perhaps most vividly in the Carey character’s constant anxiety over what she perceives as her poverty. Adelaide reminds her, frequently, that in fact she is comparatively well off: “It took me a long time to recognise the peculiar kind of anxiety that was eating her up,” she writes, describing the heart of the depression as “the awful spectre of the impoverished older woman”. It didn’t matter, Adelaide continues, that in fact her income was adequate, that she owned a house in much better repair than feared, that she had various options; her friend seemed unable to internalise this actuality, or to transform her fears into action. Her depression only deepened.Literature, both writing and reading, has certainly proven useful for many people living with affective disorders. But it is not a panacea. This is particularly the case for professional writers, for whom writing is not a prescription, but the primary compulsion. In fact, as Adelaide notes, ruefully: I realised the worst irony of all … Words were our life, but they could not save a life.They can portray a life, though. Chaos, misogyny and imposter syndromeThis book crafts an elegant, eloquent portrait of the characters, from the anxious end of primary school through a somewhat chaotic adolescence, across years of failure and success, marriages and children and divorce, to the disappointments of later life. That long relationship survived some years of separation – the Puberty Blues years – and remained close to the end. Debra Adelaide’s friendship with Gabrielle Carey began at school and survived a long separation during ‘the Puberty Blues years’. UQP As it builds, what becomes clear is that the stories of its two friends are not unusual, or merely personal. They reflect a systemic issue in our society – one vividly documented in Carey and Kathy Lette’s coauthored autobiographical novel Puberty Blues. Here too, woven through the anecdotes about their adolescence (for example), is evidence of the problems that dog the lives of girls, from baseline misogyny to rape culture. And such problems do not necessarily end with adolescence. The narrator describes her friend as feeling “suffocated in the darkness and ignominy of impoverished old-womanism” and the sense that “her whole life had been worthless”. It is devastating that a woman whose life was successful in so many terms should feel such a failure. This comes across as a reflection not on the Carey character, nor the Adelaide one, but on the pervasive experience of imposter syndrome – and how it contaminates the perception of what are, by most measures, actually pretty attractive lives.Possibility of a better lifeCountering this grief, is what I read as a metaphor – or an actuality operating as a metaphor – that runs right through the book: the presence of wild birds. The herons they watch together during their outdoor walks; the sacred ibis/bin chickens forgetting their origins as Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing. There are galahs, cockatoos, Australian miners, Indian mynas, magpies, king parrots. Throughout, birds are scavenging, soaring, playing, squabbling, raising chicks and lifting spirits. And they offer pragmatic perspectives, as Adelaide describes after watching herons bickering halfheartedly: “It was a lesson in stoicism, in accepting the things I cannot change.”There is no pretence here that life is straightforward, that disappointments can be shrugged off, and that no one will die too soon. But this pragmatism is not the whole story. There is hope, too. Almost at the end of the book, Adelaide describes her little granddaughters as “all fresh, barely opened notebooks on which the most amazing stories were yet to be inscribed”. There is always the possibility of a better life.If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.Jen Webb has received funding from the Australian Research Council.