In fact,it became loaded with meaning and revelatory hindsight. Finished in a state of grief after the death of her mother,Aphrodite’s Breath is raw,brave,beautiful and with an emotional truth,Johnson knows,“it mightn’t otherwise have had”.
It is a journey outwards to a Greek island and inwards to all the maddening,complicated,ambivalent,inescapable love between a mother and an adult daughter all magnified by being in a foreign place that would reveal who each of them really was. Now,though,Johnson wonders if she ever fully knew her mother. “There was a whole lot of mystery at the heart of Mum,” she says. “There’s no way I could have sat down and had a full and frank discussion with Mum.”
When she was a young woman,Johnson had experienced something close to rapture on the island of Kythera where she had spent several months. “Everything was luminous,” she writes,the sea was “an exultant blue”,she fell “fatally and irrevocably in love with Kythera”. In the intervening years she had been “a wanderer in many lands”,writing her books,living in Hong Kong,France,and a decade in London. But for nine years she had been marooned in Brisbane,working as a journalist and the sole breadwinner for her two sons,getting up at five in the morning to write her novelsThe Landing andFrom Where I Fell.
As soon as her sons left home,so did she,with her mother in tow. “I did realise in retrospect that part of it was not wanting to face the empty nest,definitely.” But she couldn’t leave her mother and in a reckless moment asked her to go and live with her in Greece. Yes,her mother said:“I’ll be close to heaven if my time is up”.
“Doesn’t that sound like fun,” a former lover is reported to have remarked. “Mamma Mia meetsApocalypse Now.”
When Susan and Barbara Johnson left for Greece she was 62 and her mother was 85,“brave and foolish in equal measure”,she writes. “We went forth blazing,as if nothing could fell us.” Now,she says,“neither of us thought she was going to die. We didn’t even think she would get sick.”