Miles Franklin winning author Alex Miller's A Brief Affair (2022) was given to me as a gift for Christmas that year and has been on my to-be-read pile ever since. In an effort to read what I have before acquiring more, I grabbed this book off my shelf and read it over a couple evenings.
The office where Frances works is in a grand building that was once an asylum. The academic offices are in the cells which once held the unfortunate inmates. Frances feels a presence in Cell 16 and when she comes into possession of a diary belonging to Valerie Sommers, a resident of that room decades before, she feels an instant connection. As she reads Valerie's diary, and learns of her forbidden love for Jessie, Frances becomes obsessed with knowing what happened to her.
Miller has crafted a fully formed character in Frances Egan. She is conflicted personally about her role as wife and mother. At work she faces bullying from her boss and undermining from her peers. She feels invisible to those around her, and her husband's adorations ('you are perfect') are dismissed as though he doesn't really see her. Egan cannot see herself and the ways in which she is an agent of what is happening in her life.
This is a slow, subtle book, meandering in unexpected ways. I never really knew where this story was going, and was just immersed in the moment. I found Valerie's story particularly fascinating and would have liked to know more about her. Indeed in some respects a more interesting novel lies within Valerie's tale....
I also appreciated the way Miller portrayed the treatment of mental health, through locating part of the story at a former institution. I understand he based his institution on the Sunbury Lunatic Asylum which was used to house mentally ill patients from 1879 to the 1980s. In the 1990s it was taken over by Victoria University and used as a campus until 2011.
Overall, this was a hopeful novel about the interior life of an ordinary woman by a master writer.
Miller won the Miles Franklin Award for The Ancestor Game (1993) and Journey to Stone Country (2003).
