Life is no fairytale, as Benison O'Reilly found when her comfortable world was shattered - by Linda Morris
True to the title of her first fiction work Happily Ever After?, Benison O'Reilly writes her heroine a happy ending. Of sorts. The likeable but flawed Ellie Parkes carries fanciful illusions of marriage when she weds a man Mother Nature managed to get just right, and as their marriage unravels, O'Reilly's heroine declares with a one of world-weariness: "Ultimately, my story fails as a fairytale."
Nobody knows better than O'Reilly the crooked course life can take and the potential for disappointment.
It is wiser to enter marriage assuming something will go wrong, she says, for happily ever after is never guaranteed, and nor should we expect it. Infidelity, financial problems, infertility, redundancy and ill health can strain a marriage, O'Reilly says, and Cinderella stories rarely come true - especially if your youngest son has autism.
O'Reilly fell for the fairytale myth when she married James, a GP, and settled into comfortable middle-class urbanity in an inner-city cottage in Sydney.
"The second-worst day of my life was February 27, 2004, when the paediatrician sat James and I down and told us what I had tried to deny for so long, that our son had autism," she says. "The worst day of my life was two days later at his third birthday party when I compared him to all the talkative preschoolers and realised how disabled he was. That terrible time around my son's diagnosis changed my views on life."
Readers get to sample some of O'Reilly's pain when Ellie, the disappointed princess of her novel, succumbs to depression after suffering a late-term miscarriage. Miscarriage becomes a metaphor for her son's autism. Both are lost boys. In O'Reilly's clipped writing, the reader shares her grief and guilt that somehow her genes might have contributed to her son's condition.
"I was quite depressed, as all parents are, and resentful as to why this happened to me," she says.
The autism diagnosis was six years ago and O'Reilly describes herself as "essentially recovered", a word usually associated with alcoholism or cancer but which says much about the intensity of her reaction to the diagnosis and how it is no longer her nemesis.
It turns out her son is not badly affected by autism. In her words, he is bright, chatty and loves school, even if he remains a little bit different. His steady progress has only now given her permission to write, something that might, indeed, have also been predestined.
The random mixing of DNA that may or may not have predisposed her child to autism could also be responsible for her love of her books and writing. O'Reilly's uncle was the political correspondent Neil O'Reilly, reported to have been the first journalist to learn that Sir John Kerr had sacked the Whitlam government.
Her grandfather's cousin was Eleanor Dark, the celebrated 20th-century author. O'Reilly has no memory of Dark, though their families were close and she shares her first name with the house that Dark lived in while growing up in Vaucluse.
Dark, who was an O'Reilly before marriage, sleeps in the shadows of O'Reilly's nascent writing career, at once a figure of inspiration and intimidation. Both write of relationships, of the complex inner woman, but whereas Dark wrote from the security of what her biographer Marivic Wyndham describes as a "world-proof life", O'Reilly writes from a position of raw experience.
"Eleanor observes her characters and doesn't judge," says O'Reilly. "I'm much the same. The main characters in my novel behave in a way that society would probably deem to be 'bad', but are they bad? I think there are good reasons for their actions, and it's our flaws that make us interesting, after all. Of course, her technical skill surpasses anything I could aspire to. She's a master wordsmith, a literary writer, and I have no such pretensions. As a matter of fact, I think she put me off writing for a decade, as I read Prelude to Christopher, which she wrote when she was only 34, and was blown away by her talent."
O'Reilly graduated from Tamworth High School in the early '80s as, she says, an underachieving student who had marks good enough to choose between studying pharmacy and journalism. In the middle of a recession she picked the more conservative career path, which guaranteed a job after study, and acknowledges the serendipitous road that has taken her from dispensing medicine back to writing.
Happily Ever After?, her entry into fiction, began two years ago when O'Reilly was in Fiji on a family holiday. She had read Marian Keyes's latest novel and thought, "I could do that." The genesis of a plot rattled around her head like a loose penny as she lounged poolside and then, hit by a stomach bug, she sat by the toilet one night, dehydrated and exhausted from a night of vomiting, and mapped out her storyline.
Back home, on the oak dining table of the family home, television on, sons boisterously playing outside, she laid out chapter 11 in one sitting, including a pivotal scene in which Eleanor glimpses her future.
"Maybe things will change down the track if it becomes more of a job, but I adore sitting down at my computer to write," O'Reilly says. "I love immersing myself in a topic and telling a 'story' - this applies just as much to my nonfiction writing, too. It's like I've entered another world, a much calmer and controlled world than the one I usually occupy."
O'Reilly's first book, co-written with Seana Smith, was the Australian Autism Handbook. Now in its third print run, it was written as a realistic and hopeful antidote to the gloomy medical view of the disorder and is considered the bible for parents of children struggling it. Smith describes her collaborator as a "real thinker with a serious brain", and doesn't doubt Happily Ever After? will be the first of many novels that will take her on a more literary trajectory.
O'Reilly, now in her 40s, never went down the route of "alternative medical madness" after the autism diagnosis, says Smith. "She rolled up her sleeves and said, 'I'm going to help my child,' and she kept her head together better than most other mothers because she had a healthy measure of self-preservation. She worked in a hospital for a time, and saw death up close. When someone said there was nothing worse than autism, she knew there were worse things."
For Happily Ever After? O'Reilly stuck to her strengths, dialogue and humour "but with a heavy dose of realism".
"I've never been a Mills & Boon fan," O'Reilly says. "I don't accept the mythology sold in these books of the transformative power of love. All the love in the world can't mend a damaged soul."
O'Reilly says her son's diagnosis has brought mixed blessings. She once pondered a future for her three boys in which they were married and academic successes. It's now her belief that if her children are healthy and reasonably happy, anything else is a bonus.
The experience has made her a kinder, wiser person who doesn't sweat the small stuff, she says, and has helped open a door to a writing career - she is drafting a guide on perinatal depression and anxiety, and already has the working title for her next novel, Careful What You Wish For.
Happily Ever After? by Benison Anne O'Reilly is published on May 1, 2010 by Jane Curry Publishing, $32.99.