Germaine Greer Critical Essay | Critical Review by Hermione Lee

Critical Review by Hermione Lee

SOURCE: “Mother Country,” in The New Republic, March 26, 1990, pp. 33-5.

In the following review, Lee offers positive evaluation of Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.

The real problem is Mummy. “Reg Greer” is called Daddy by his middle-aged daughter, even after his death, because she would still like to love him, and would like him to have loved her. But Mummy, very much alive, is never called anything else but “Mother,” a word, we are told at the outset, “admirably adapted for saying through clenched teeth.” As the world's most famous feminist sets out, teeth clenched, across the world in search of her father's true life story, she is balked, mocked, and misled by her terrible mother, who sits perpetually tanning her aged body on her sunbed in a Melbourne suburb, made up to the nines and shrieking with demonic laughter.

It's an Australian version of Conrad's grimly knitting...
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