Little Plum by Laura McPhee-Browne
Little Plum (2023) is Laura McPhee-Browne’s latest reckoning with the effects of psychosis as they disrupt everyday life – in this case, the life of a young woman named Coral. Written with the same delicious melancholy that her previous work, Cherry Beach (2020) is steeped in, Little Plum follows the journey of Coral as she unwittingly becomes pregnant, and then a mother.
Coral is on the cusp of thirty, with a convoluted relationship with her mother and an obsessive-compulsive disorder that has her tapping and shrugging more and more as she is thrust into the swirling world of unplanned motherhood. A journalist by vocation, Coral is finding it difficult to find the words to address the baby that’s growing inside of her: until she christens it ‘little plum’.
“Coral's thoughts return to the thing growing inside her. It is the size of a plum. 'Little Plum, she says, without moving her lips, Little Plum, I love you: She wants to love it, the little plum, though she can't think of it as what it is becoming quite yet a baby, and not just a piece of fruit.”
While motherhood is often portrayed as the most natural thing for a woman to experience, reality is far from this. Like the fictional narrator of Little Plum, many mums-to-be don’t feel connected to their unborn baby, for a variety of reasons. McPhee-Browne does an excellent job of painting pregnancy in very realistic colours, conveying Coral’s uneasiness and tentative acceptance with commendable tenderness. As Coral navigates her own journey, it becomes clear that each pregnancy is unique, and each mother must forge their motherhood in the best way they know how. And as the book progresses, there are gaps that start to fill in for Coral.
“Coral can't imagine living without a gaping hole at her centre, though she is starting to wonder whether a baby could fill it up.”
Similar to McPhee-Browne’s previous work, both in its tone and subject matter, Little Plum is underpinned by an uneasy poignancy that permeates the thoughts of the narrator and their general outlook on life. Like Cherry Beach’s Ness, Coral is a passive narrator, over whom life washes in waves, slowly and steadily forming her into who she is. The result of which is narration that comes in and out focus, removed from anyone past Coral’s peripheral vision, rendering side characters one-dimensional and forgettable.
What adds an extra layer of intrigue, however, is Coral’s OCD.
“As Coral eats and listens and answers questions when they come, her brain imagines her hand picking up Topaz’s steak knife and ploughing it into her own belly, in front of them all, the blood splattering so far it covers the faces of the other customers, who would have never experienced anything so untoward in their lives. She shakes her head to dislodge the thought, and stabs a piece of lettuce instead.”
These visions come and go – often they’re in relation to the baby, always they’re destructive – and Coral manages to live life without subjecting herself to their power. However, brimming with electricity is a deeper layer to her mental illness, one that keeps the reader just on the edge, flirting with the possibility of Coral finally acting on her intrusive thoughts. Of course she never does – “This is how the intrusive thoughts happen — she is not scared — they are often violent and often far removed from what she wants, from what she is capable of” – but it is her wavering stability that tips everything towards the imaginable and therefore terrifying.
In comparison with the slow and steady, unattached style of the book’s beginning and by McPhee-Browne’s own admission, the second half of Little Plum plummets towards its nerve-wrecking conclusion in a rush. Made darkly claustrophobic by Coral’s postpartum psychosis, the last section of this book is as much a testament to the mind-bending nature of motherhood as it is a bold exploration of a condition experienced by many and not talked about enough.
It is during this last part of the book that Little Plum becomes impossible to put down, in the same way it was impossible for McPhee-Browne to stop writing it. Transformed from its steady, water-like flow, you are forced to keep on reading by the electrifying powers running through these pages. The end result is an experience so close and personal, you feel as if you are the one experiencing a psychotic break. Without having ever experienced one, I can say that McPhee-Browne brings you as close to it as you’d ever like to get.
It is, however, not the Hollywood cut-out ending you might expect after such a roller-coaster, making Little Plum both raw and truthful, a bold conclusion arrived at by Coral herself:
“She concludes nothing, because there is nothing to understand. Life is unfair and life is fateful.”
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.