MEMOIR My Brother Jaz Gideon Haigh Melbourne University Press, $24.99 Gideon Haigh has always been an incomparable journalist, someone who can write about cricket or business or the polarising Daniel Andrews. I have an ancient memory of the launch of his first book; now we learn that came just after the death of his brother Jaz, who died on August 13, 1987.
Haigh has finally written about what is the defining sorrow of his life. The upshot, in a few thousand words, is a masterpiece, a transfiguring revelation of what his love for Jaz was and a recreation – magnificent in the sweep and detail of its articulation – of the depressive hulk of a human being it left him as, bereft and trying not to feel anything, least of all the remotest hint of pleasure. The elimination of pleasure was the penance Gideon Haigh imposed on himself after his brother’s death.
Credit: Natalie Grono And then the crucial paradox of this sustained and scarifying piece of self-revelation is the fact that Haigh was impelled to it by a woman who sparked a capacity for love in him he didn’t know was there, and whose passion has made him overturn the habit of a tightly disciplined well-spent lifetime. He had always despised autofiction, just as he had taken years to use a personal pronoun. Gideon Haigh has written about the defining sorrow of his life.
Haigh had always adored his brother Jaz, four years his junior, who was always the wild boy, the guy with the dope plant in a box, the skateboard, the .