The Kookaburra

Charlotte Guest’s The Kookaburra follows Diana, a seventy-year-old former academic and essayist living alone in a deteriorating cottage on a Tasmanian island. Her husband Robert died of pancreatic cancer one year earlier, after forty-one years of marriage, and Diana has not adapted to his absence so much as constructed an elaborate system for avoiding it. She reads about grief, researches the possibility of writing a book about widowhood and studies her own reactions as though mourning were another academic subject. Meanwhile, her house fills with unopened parcels, dirty clothes, books and administrative papers. She cries over broken light bulbs and lost teeth but often feels strangely numb when she thinks directly about Robert.

The event that begins the story is Diana’s discovery of a private email correspondence between Robert and her younger sister Julie. Diana has entered Robert’s account while searching for information about an investment portfolio. Their ninety-year-old father is becoming increasingly frail, and Julie believes that he should be assessed for residential care. Diana wants to provide money for modifications that might allow him to remain at home, but Robert managed their finances and she cannot locate the necessary account details.

Instead, a search for the word “share” reveals twelve long emails between Robert and Julie. They are not sexually or romantically involved. The betrayal is emotional. Robert wrote to Julie with a tenderness, openness and philosophical seriousness that Diana believed belonged to their marriage. He told Julie stories Diana had never heard properly and described feelings he had concealed from his wife. Even worse, he wrote about Diana herself, making the correspondence feel like a private judgement delivered after his death.