When Susan Johnson began planning her return to Kythera, the Greek island of her youthful summers, she knew it would be different this time around. The Australian writer first “fell fatally and irrevocably in love with Kythera” in the 1970s on a trip “that set the course for the rest of my life – as a writer, as a perennial exile, as a person”.
Returning as a 62-year-old, she was also now travelling with her 85-year-old mother, Barbara. What Johnson could not forecast was the extreme emotional climate that would buffet them both.
In this exuberant and revealing memoir, Johnson writes of seeking a sense of freedom that had long been buried by work, motherhood and mortgages. Her marriage now ended and her adult sons living in London, she decides to head to Kythera – but in order to run away, she must bring along Barbara, for whom she feels responsible.
Mother and daughter arrive in Kythera in February 2019 at the tail end of a long, bitter winter, which blows through their rented house. Barbara, a Brisbane widow used to first-class travel as a corporate wife, is unhappy from the beginning with the island’s discomforts and her daughter’s imperfections. It is no holiday for Johnson, either, who is editing her ninth novel and has a contract for this book. Always on her mind is her precarious income as an author. But she turns her many talents to capturing life as it happens in Kythera for what would become Aphrodite’s Breath, a bookend to her first memoir, A Better Woman, which was about the shocks of motherhood.
In Aphrodite’s Breath, Johnson writes with a journalist’s direct style about the rocky island’s landscapes and villages, and its ever-present history and mythology as the birthplace of Aphrodite. Tiny Kythera has strong ties through its diaspora to Australia and “Brisbanika”, where Johnson was born.
But with the skills of a novelist, she also creates a vibrant microcosm of domestic rhythms, expeditions, mishaps and characters. The narrative rises and falls with the seasons. When summer arrives, Kythera ripens into a sun-drenched, flower-scented idyll, with the “tambourine shake of cicadas”, festivals, harvests, swimming, dancing, friendship and naughty eros. Mother and daughter’s moods lighten, too.
Aphrodite’s Breath is also an intimate self-portrait of the mother-daughter relationship, one intensified by proximity and differences in temperament. Wanting to relive the island’s pleasures, Johnson reverts to being a passive-aggressive good girl, anxious and guilty, trying and failing to please her mother. Their standoffs are poignant but Johnson has a light comic touch, often at her own expense. “[My mother] was forever making a sshh sshh sound when I was speaking … I wasn’t trying to impersonate Melina Mercouri thrilling the punters in Never on Sunday by being a sexpot and smashing plates,” she writes. “But somehow I kept leaking out of the sides of her shush, as I had always done.”
Johnson attempts to learn Greek, but a lack of progress leaves her feeling isolated, especially as a woman who lives by words. Unlike US author Mary Norris, whose knowledge of the language informed her recent travel memoir, Greek to Me, Johnson has to find inventive ways to communicate. “Yippety Yippety”, the name given by a visiting Australian butcher to his girlfriend’s unpronounceable village, becomes her shorthand joke.
But as summer fades on Kythera, life again shifts for the Johnson women: Barbara flies home early and leaves her daughter to live through another winter and the shock of Covid alone.
There is, of course, a vast literature by travellers to Greek islands. Johnson makes only fleeting mention of Charmian Clift, the Australian writer who lived on Hydra and inspired her 2004 novel, The Broken Book. Perhaps Clift is overused as a model of expat bohemia and Johnson has moved on. Her interest now is Rosina Kasmati, the Kythera-born mother of Irish writer Lafcardio Hearn, whose tragic life embodies themes of the changing roles and dislocation of women.
With fine control, Johnson allows us to travel close to her emotional skin; the last chapters of Aphrodite’s Breath left me sobbing. Always self-scrutinising, Johnson questions whether, by writing this book, she is exposing her mother unfairly, and admits that, at one point, she almost stopped writing.
But beautiful, determined Barbara willingly gave her daughter’s story its necessary spine and drama, and Aphrodite’s Breath is their shared gift to us, in all its shades of luminous and deep dark blue.
Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson is published by Allen & Unwin ($34.99)
