White Noise
by Raelke Grimmer
UWA Publishing
Fifteen year-old Emma is woken by her father’s nightmares again. This has happened since her mother died and she doesn’t know how to help him … besides, she has enough of her own problems to worry about.
As Albert Camus noted, “Nobody realises that some people expend a tremendous amount of energy merely to be normal.” A recent diagnosis of autism meant that Emma now has a name for the things she has been struggling with.
Actually, until the diagnosis, she didn’t know that she had been struggling, even though she regularly shut down and had to escape to her corner in the library with her noise-cancelling headphones. Emma had thought that everyone got overwhelmed.
The exhaustion after a shutdown is almost worse than the shutdown itself, making Emma feel like a malfunctioning computer, and she often finds herself at the hospital emergency room needing medical help.
Emma is distressed because her best friend Summer is moving away from the neighbourhood to the other side of town, which means she will no longer be a bike ride away. Emma has also just found out that she has won a place in the Sport Institute Volleyball Program, something Summer had desperately wanted.
One escape that both Emma and her father have is that they go running at East Point Reserve for the last three and a half years. This allows them to escape the grief, Emma’s struggles and her father’s stress from working as an emergency room doctor.
Set in tropical Darwin, this Young Adult novel delves into the stain that grief leaves on minds and the difficulties of dealing with change when your mind just wants things to stay the same. Change isn’t something Emma can outrun.
Raelke Grimmer said that she began writing about what grief looked like for a father and a daughter three years after their loss. But she was diagnosed with autism during that time and one day, she sat down to write and realised that she had been writing Emma as someone with autism.
“I also saw that this intersected in interesting ways with how she experiences and processes her grief in the book and I wanted to explore that. So it all unfolded very organically as I wrote.”
Lezly Herbert
