So Many Selves is a fascinating memoir of a woman of our times. Gabrielle Carey is far more than the other half of the collaboration that was 'Puberty Blues'. She embodies the truth that 'the self is more substantial than the name'.
The three essays in So Many Selves explore the journey of self-discovery that Gabrielle embarked on as girl - from being a Salami Sister in Sydney to hanging out in a Benedictine monastery in County Limerick; going from a wet, war-torn town in Northern Ireland to a semi-tropical village in Veracruz, Mexico; returning to Australia as a single parent with a small daughter.
In 'Confessions of a Teenage Celebrity' the middle-class teenager from Sylvania achieves early celebrity and equally quickly rejects it. It's a candid tale of her intense and creatively productive friendship with Kathy Lette and of its bitter ending. Along the way, the reader meets mentors, media personalities and a murderer.
Gabrielle leaves Australia on a writer's grant and, disillusioned by her literary pilgrimage in England, ends up in Northern Ireland where she is seduced by the warmth, charm and intelligence of the Irish. 'A Reluctant Novice' explores her search for self-acceptance as the conflict between her innate Protestantism and the attractions of Catholic spirituality mirrors the conflict she's already discovered between the body and the spirit. 'Mexican Masks' is the story of an imperfect love affair. Gabrielle falls in love with a Mexican village and then a Mexican man but she discovers that love built on uncertain foundations won't survive the inability to communicate.
Each essay is not only brimful of wonderful tales but contains acute observations on all manner of themes - the nature of writing and writers, the cult of celebrity, the Protestantism of Australia, living in a Third World country. So Many Selves is for the reader a intensely enjoyable observation of the getting of wisdom of a very appealing character.
