The Little Clothes by Deborah Callaghan
Being in your late thirties can be an odd time, especially for women. It’s something of a liminal space between youth, as society defines it, and what comes after: the threat of irrelevance and invisibility, even as you enter the heartland of your life.
This liberating and stifling invisibility is at the heart of Deborah Callaghan’s darkly humorous novel The Little Clothes(2024). It’s the story of Audrey, a woman at the cusp of midlife, and the internal and external reckoning that occurs when she decides, finally, to take what she needs and wants.
Audrey is thirty-eight. She’s single. She’s not a mother – the ‘little clothes’ of the book’s title aren’t for a baby but for herself, stored lovingly but unused. She has a beloved pet rabbit, who is both a comfort and source of anxiety. She’s a lawyer, admired for her skill and dedication but overlooked for partnership for “not being a team player”. She has become, both slowly and suddenly, invisible. “Audrey knew no one was looking,” Callaghan writes.
It’s her invisibility, however, that sets her free when she realises that, unseen, she can do as she wishes.
Audrey is an intriguing narrator. She’s not particularly likeable, and she doesn’t try to be. She’s prickly, but she’s also funny, Callaghan imbuing her with a dry wit that captures both the reader’s attention and the affection of those around her.
As an acquaintance comments, Audrey is loved by everyone. But why?
“No one sees me, Sue. I’m not a challenge or a threat. I’m useful. And trust me, not everyone loves me. Which has never bothered me.”
One of the book’s cover quotes, from Imbi Neeme, describes this as a “coming-of-middle-age story”. It’s a genre that’s having a moment. Miranda July’s All Fours (2024) is one of many stories of women breaking out of the mould society has cast for them and stepping into a new life.
This book occupies a very different world and literary style to All Fours. Audrey is not an artist on the brink, embracing chaotic fluidity, but her story has similar themes. Like July’s narrator, Audrey doesn’t intend to change, but spontaneously grabs a moment of frustration and makes a choice so outside her usual way of being that it sets her on a new path.
The book’s detached narration mirrors Audrey’s own self-alienation. Her detachment, we learn, is born of trauma and the fragility of her closest relationships. Her brother and best friend, closeted from his parents but open with his friends and sister, has died. Her father loves her unconditionally, but without knowing anything of her past trauma.
The fraught complexity of her relationship with her grieving mother Rita is at the heart of the story and Audrey’s alienation. Rita is an alarmingly unsympathetic character whose maternal anxieties grate at the reader perhaps even more than the story allows them to frustrate Audrey. We learn that Audrey experienced significant trauma as a child, kept quiet by her mother, who remains unable to talk of the past. Audrey herself barely remembers it at first.
It’s been locked up forever and now it’s here. It’s caught me.
The tiny clothes in Audrey’s closet embody innocence and hope, lost and found. Rita, we learn, had her own collection of little clothes for a miscarried baby. “We only ever planned two children and now they’ve both gone,” she tells Audrey.
In this gut punch of a moment – two children, both dead, but then what is Audrey? – her daughter attempts to protect her from recognising the harm she has done, in a way that her mother was never able to do for her. The detached narrative voice, however, means the action feels a little distant, even during these emotive moments.
At times, Audrey seems to be from another era. The use of certain terms – “a curette” for an abortion, for example – feels awkward, given her age. This timeless and ageless quality– she could be written in the same way and be 20 years older – captures her disaffection. Audrey has become an observer, rather than a participant – a critic of the lives unfolding around her.
“I like to watch,” she says.
This observer voice, however, keeps even the reader at a distance. It’s the moments looking back on her deep love for and friendship with her brother, and connection with his world, that feel most like the life of a single woman in her thirties in 2024. Her grief at his loss is also grief for the loss of her own connection to a more vibrant life, and an expression of her past trauma.
Perhaps, she thought, her common ground with her brother was that as children they had both been unseen and misunderstood by their mother.
Without their relationship as an anchor, she’s adrift, only truly close to her father. Ironically, Henry’s death has allowed their relationship to become an emotional lifeline, and it’s this relationship that brings the warmest moments in the book.
Henry’s death had unravelled father and daughter so completely, yet they came to know each other differently and better through grief. Slowly, in listening and small gestures, each attended to the other’s wounds.
There’s much to enjoy in this deceptively complex story of mid-life chaos. Audrey is a sharp and cutting, if frustrating, protagonist. She starts the book unable to look to the future.
She felt trapped. As trapped as Henry was in his old bedroom. Suspended like the lemons in preserving jars lined up on Rita’s pantry shelves.
By the end, she can look forward and reach out for connection, but she doesn’t come entirely to life with the change. Her progress is bound by the rules of her existing world, and her voice remains at a distance from the reader as if we, too, are not yet allowed a full connection with her story. Still, her biting wit and her stumbling progress towards a future make this an enjoyable and engaging read.
Davina Russell is a writer who lives in Sydney on Bidjigal land. She writes fiction and non-fiction, including personal essays on pop culture, obsession, identity, motherhood and mental health. Instagram: davinarussell_