The fiction debut The Truth About My Daughter (Hawkeye Publishing 2024) by Jo Skinner is a thoughtful portrait of the dynamics of families, with an emphasis on themes of parenthood and parent/child relationships; pregnancy, miscarriage and fertility issues; and illness and grief.
With a good eye for detail, evocative description and great dialogue, Skinner tells a very Brisbane-based story that will appeal to local readers with many mentions of well-known landmarks and specific cafes and shops, while the broader themes of how families function – or the ways in which they are dysfunctional – will resonate with many more readers.
The novel has a mysterious start, hooking us in with what might come, before unravelling the rather complicated family situation of the main character Fin, who we meet at various ages throughout the story, from when she was a child in the eighties, to almost the present day. Skinner is good at orientating the reader by the details of the times and settings – those old enough to remember the eighties will reminisce over small, forgotten details, and all readers will connect with the scenes set during the height of the Covid pandemic, when life became difficult and dangerous for so many.
The author has worked hard to construct complex and interesting characters, with Fin’s father Victor being a particular example of a man of his time and circumstances. His language and his actions demonstrate the controlling force he exerts on his family. Skinner has created an authentic portrayal of the bond between sisters Fin and George, with all the frustrations, sense of responsibility, regret, love and anger that often accompany siblings’ interactions.
The book does go back and forth a lot in time, set in 1985/6, 1989, 1992/3, 2001, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, but because the story is not told in a linear way, I did become a little disoriented with going back and forth, and trying to remember who was in what stage of their life at what time, perhaps interfering a bit with the pace of the story. So while I felt the author kept close control of each individual time section, it did require some work to keep everything straight in my head during the changeovers. The final chapters are given names rather than dates, which actually was a rather clever way to delineate the separate chapters all set in the one time. The different periods do all come together in the end in a satisfying way.
The narrative contains at least two major surprises which really were both shocking and unexpected, these twists coming at just the right times to grip the reader with suspense about what might happen next. I felt that the author really hit her stride in the second half of the book, which was tender, authentic and tense.
The story contains more than one romantic exploration, and I guess would be placed in the Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Domestic Fiction or Commercial Fiction genre (although I hate labelling and feel it’s only useful for readers to get some idea of how the book might pan out). Skinner gives us some beautiful sentences, two of which I wrote down because I read them over and over again:
‘She longed to lose herself in the wisdom of stories told by people with only the final pages of their lives left to live.’
And also:
‘Steinbaur [the family name] history was rewritten even while it was happening until it became difficult to recall which bits were fabricated or embellished.’
I think both of these are good examples of the issues that the author explores in this novel, about family and family stories, about memory and the conflicting memories of different people who experienced the same events, about aging and grief and loss, and about the complex and complicated layers and dynamics which make up all families – making them messy, frustrating, difficult and contradictory, and yet which nevertheless remind us that blood is thicker than water, and that when family ties and bonds are tested, they often bend rather than break. It is also a reminder that we can choose our family, and as we get older, we often do choose to focus our energy and time on people – whether blood-related or not – who we have decided are the ones who give us back the most in return.