Dreamtime Alice
By Mandy Sayer
Ballantine Books, $24.95
When today’s novelists write about their parents, the result is usually a literary temper tantrum or a whine. Such chronicles are typically filled with abusive and/or distant fathers, overprotective and/or remote mothers and sensitive children–children who grow up to produce a few hundred pages of dreary payback.
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How refreshing, then, to come across Mandy Sayer’s memoir “Dreamtime Alice.” A young Australian novelist and former busker, Sayer dances her way through this account of an entertainer’s life with her jazz musician father on the streets of New York and New Orleans in the 1980s.
“He hated being a father,” Mandy writes of charming, unreliable Gerry Sayer. “The most I could hope for was a friend.” That practical assessment, free of sentiment and bitterness, sets the tone for a book that delicately portrays the elusive nature of all human bonds, in particular the tangled one between offspring and parent.
Gerry and Mandy arrive in New York City in 1983 with his drum kit, her tap shoes and a lively street act. He is 63, she is 20 and both have something to prove. Gerry wants to show the doubters back in Australia (including his ex-wife) that he can make it on the world’s toughest streets. And Mandy wants to become a character in one of Gerry’s stories, “to merit a place in his life.” But before that happens, tough times repeatedly force her back into a childhood fantasy, that of being Alice in “Through the Looking Glass,” the girl who disappears.
Soon father and daughter are pushing their shopping cart of equipment around New York City, performing and learning how to hold a crowd, avoid the cops and spot the producers. “Almost every week there’d be some middle-aged man in a belted spy coat, smoking cigarettes and talking big,” Mandy says.
But winter arrives before the big break, driving them south to a more surreal existence in a room behind a New Orleans witchcraft store. Despite the love potions concocted by a warlock neighbor, Mandy’s love life remains bleak.
Sayer’s descriptions are fresh and immediate, whether she is recalling street life, flea-pit lodgings and desperate friendships or the development of her own dance technique. The only false note is the overblown language of the final chapters. “I was . . . becoming my own magician,” she says, explaining how her craft, her sexuality and her relationship with her father matured. But this is hardly more than a footnote to an otherwise charming and buoyant memoir.