Bad Archive

Flora Feltham

• Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781776922604
• Edition: 1

Bold, beautiful and constantly surprising essays about life, loss, joy and the fabric of memory. In this deftly woven work Flora Feltham explores the corners where her memories are stashed: the archive vault, her mother' s house, a marriage counsellor' s office, the tip and New World. She takes us on a frenzied bender in Croatia, learns tapestry and meets romance novelists, all while wondering how families and relationships absorb the past, given everything we don' t say about grief, mental illness or even love. Most importantly, she asks, how do you write about a life honestly – when there are so many flaws in the way we record history and, more confrontingly, in the way we remember? Bad Archive is a lucid, continually surprising, funny and at times bracingly personal essay collection by the winner of the Letteri Family Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 2021.

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• On Archiving
• A Portrait of My Mother
• Gather Your Strength
• Proust Yourself
• Dekmantel Selectors
• Julian of Norwich
• My Mother’s Daughters
• The Raw Material
• Wyrm Farm
• Tapestry Lessons
• Bogans of the Sky
• Meccanoman
• The HEA
• Author’s Note
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements