Specimen: Personal Essays by Madison Hamill
Odd, incisive and skillfully written, Specimen: Personal Essays won the general non-fiction prize at last year’s Ockham Book Awards — and for good reason. The collection marks an engaging new voice in the Aotearoa literary landscape; one unafraid to probe the strangeness of everyday life. There’s a subtle psychological, even anthropological dimension to Hamill’s observations. This is fitting, since at its heart Specimen is a study of others and herself.
In the opening essay, “The New Leadership”, Hamill revisits the dubious methods of her former teacher Mr Woods. Determined to shape his preteen students into great leaders, Mr Woods assigns them more and more responsibilities: from road safety patrol to keeping peace in the playground. When he introduces special leadership badges, Hamill’s cohort becomes divided as though along class lines. The result is a kind of reverse Dead Poets Society: instead of liberating his pupils, Mr Woods builds a hierarchy where some are rewarded for obedience while others are punished for falling short. Hamill recounts this all matter-of-factly, including the way school told her to conquer her shyness, with teachers regarding her mumbled good mornings as rudeness instead of anxiety. It’s an unassuming start to the collection, and while not one of my highlights, I like how the essay ends on an empowering note — Hamill giving back her badges, realising she doesn’t have to change herself or her values to fit into anyone’s system.
“Suspending Disbelief” wrestles with this more deeply. In this essay, Hamill showcases her ability to thread together a series of diverse anecdotes, from playing carols in the mall accompanied by the local homeless woman to arguing with her family about abortion. All are underscored by a common theme: belief, and the certainty religion provides when deciding right and wrong. Hamill explores how her younger self became bored of those binaries. She wrote letters plotting the “salvation” of her adult self, which included becoming a missionary in “the East”, jumping off the Sky Tower in the nude, and hopefully discovering all the answers. She doesn’t have the answers now, but she has insight into what we believe and why. As she concludes, “maybe we all choose the doctrines we can tolerate the worst parts of.”
Interwoven with this discussion of faith is Hamill’s frank but affectionate portrayal of her family, a topic she returns to later in the collection. But the essay highlights a more prominent recurring idea: narrative. Several of these pieces read more like short stories than traditional essays, such as “The Scare-Cat”, which stuck in my mind for its unsettling imagery, or “Wo(und)man”, a third person piece that takes a surreal turn. Hamill’s writing is also studded with the sort of memorable language I love in fiction (“She had a round face that always seemed beleaguered, eyes ready to chew up pain like a sad old dog”, she writes in “Brief Intervention”.)
An irrepressible daydreamer, I related to Hamill’s descriptions of herself as a compulsive storyteller with a brain like “a vast TV streaming service”. But Specimen goes further, addressing the difficulties of making sense of the truth through story. It’s a compelling way to tie the collection together, and a relevant theme for any writer. In “Speculative Fiction”, Hamill recalls trying to pen a story based on her time in Cape Town as an intern at a rehabilitation centre. Yet she’s unable to capture the magic of the place, partly because what she knew about it was an inauthentic tourist fantasy. In “Iceland”, she struggles to find authenticity within herself. Looking back at her arrest for shoplifting a bottle of face wash, Hamill tries to understand why she did it. After all, she’s the protagonist, and a protagonist needs a motive. She takes us through her experiences with anxiety, her autism diagnosis and her possible alexithymia. Near the end, though, she seems to accept she’ll never be satisfied by what she finds:
‘I tried to imagine myself less as a linear cause-and-effect puzzle and more as a handbag holding a collection of organs and curiosities — a heart, two lungs, a long spool of fear, a tangle of experiences and a bottle of something brand new and imperishable that I had taken from the world and couldn’t give back.’
There are many intriguing, often funny entries in this collection. As the first two essays suggest, Hamill is most interested in people and the dynamics between them. A clever piece that’s better read than described, “Rules” opens with the rules Hamill and her sisters invented for their childhood games. It finishes with her dissecting her parents’ arguments like a scientific formula; a set of unspoken ‘rules’ known only to her family. “Ethnography of a Ranfurly Man” (my favourite essay on title alone) explores her flatmate Darren’s fixation with Ranfurly Draught, to the point where he made himself a suit of armour from used cans. Like “The New Leadership”, the essay works as brief but effective character study, examining the hyper-masculinity of the rural pub and the ways Darren does and doesn’t adhere to those expectations of manhood.
Specimen will challenge any misgivings you might have about “personal essays” if, like me, it isn’t a genre you normally read. I found the varied pieces in this book fresh, intelligent and unexpectedly relatable. Following successful collections like Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? and Rose Lu’s All Who Live on Islands, Hamill’s debut confirms there’s far more to come from young New Zealand essayists.
Anuja Mitra lives in Auckland. Her writing has been published in New Zealand and abroad, and she has reviewed poetry and theatre for the New Zealand Poetry Society, a fine line, Minarets, Tearaway and Theatre Scenes. Find her linktree and ramblings on Twitter @anuja_m9.