Signs of Damage
by Diana Reid

reviewed by Wendy Tucker

Diana Reid is one of Australia’s youngest and most admired authors. Her first novel, Love and Virtue, was published when she was just 24. This prize-winning novel of love and heartbreak was compared to Sally Rodney’s Normal People. Reid quickly followed with a second success, Seeing Other People, a forensic examination of family and power. Each of Reid’s novels takes an issue or trope that she re-examines and opens for discussion.

In her new novel she explores the ‘trauma plot’. The often used ‘marriage plot’ looks to the future – will they or won’t they? The trauma plot looks to the past – what terrible thing happened to her/him? This plot is currently very popular in novels, films and TV series. It seems once the past trauma is revealed, all will be well, the hero will be healed and become a better person.

Reid asks ‘What are we missing? Why do we now look for signs of damage in others?’ She seems to conclude that we find what we are looking for because of our own psychology. And I must admit that I feel too old for this novel about a young woman just entering full adulthood. But it intrigued me and I’m still puzzling about it.

The novel centres on Cass and her childhood friend, Anika. During an Italian
holiday with Anika’s wealthy family, Cass is accidentally locked in an old icehouse for several hours but is rescued seemingly unscathed. When at a family gathering, the now 30-year-old Cass suffers a seizure, Anika is convinced that past trauma is the cause, and that something else happened in the icehouse.

We are taken back and forward to the childhood and adolescence of the main and other characters. The role of good, mad and missing mothers is explored. The women in this novel, both mothers and daughters, are vividly and sympathetically drawn in all their complexities.

Through them, Reid continues to explore the idea that the signs of trauma we perceive in others actually come from us.

Anika’s unconfirmed yet insistent interpretation of Cass’s marriage and illness sets in motion a series of events that ends in avoidable tragedy.

This is a many themed, many layered novel of a young woman navigating today’s society with its multitude of choices. Beautifully written and thought provoking, it leaves the reader wondering.