Is it ever okay to give up on a child?

Published by Text Publishing  2024  |  Fiction 

EDENHOPE 
By Louise Le Nay 

Edenhope is the story of an ordinary woman who stares down dreadful odds – with no money, no home, no job and no plan – on a valiant quest to keep her two grandchildren safe.

Published in The Australian. 

​

Edenhope is the story of an ordinary woman who stares down dreadful odds – with no money, no home, no job and no plan – on a valiant quest to keep her two grandchildren safe.
 
Marnie Odell, in her 60s, divorced and living in Melbourne, is unexpectedly provoked into whisking off the toddlers – Frankie, aged three and Koa, almost one – on a road trip deep into country Victoria. During the journey, which eventually leads the fleeing trio to the idyllically named Edenhope, she encounters the worst and best of human behaviour, from thievery and disdain to generosity and kindness.
 
The splendour of this contemporary novel, the second for Australian author Louise Le Nay, is in the quiet, practical resilience that emanates from Marnie throughout the ordeal: her level-headed acceptance of her plight and selfless will to carry on – traits that become all the more poignant as details of Marnie's past are gradually revealed to unveil the trigger for her unplanned escape.
​

Published in the Review section of the Weekend Australian: 

The story starts as Marnie is moving into a tiny suburban granny flat she’s rented and taking up a job in a local bargain store. She seems content enough as she settles in, but there are strong hints that this is not her first new start.
 
A troubling picture emerges when, four months on, Marnie’s daughter Eleanor – ‘Lenny’ – arrives after a year of limited contact and asks to stay. Lenny’s toddlers – Marnie’s grandchildren – are in tow, as is her obnoxious boyfriend Brayden. The couple swiftly shatters Marnie’s quiet, orderly existence, bringing with them a vulgar air of entitlement, contempt for decency and neglectful parenting – spurred on mostly by their rampant heroin habit.
 
It’s difficult, at first, to reconcile Marnie’s apparent acceptance of her daughter’s odious selfishness (brilliantly characterised by Le Nay, also a script writer and actor, best known for her role as Sandy Edwards in long-running Australian television series, Prisoner).
 
But it becomes clear that Marnie’s love for her only child runs deep, despite years of drug-fuelled chaos – starting with being thrown out of high school and building up to being thrown into prison. It seems the long-ago ‘shock and shame’ that hit Marnie when she realised her teenaged child was taking drugs has been replaced with an inextinguishable hope that she’d recover. Meanwhile, Marnie has been forced time and again to pick up the messy pieces from her daughter’s endless stream of poor choices, at a terrible cost both emotionally and financially.
 
But this time, it’s different.
 
Just days after her daughter’s unsettling arrival, Marnie bundles up little Frankie and Koa and drives away from their wiped-out mother and her menacing boyfriend, with no plan other than to offer the children a better chance at safety and security.
 
What follows is a cathartic journey filled with moments of tension as well as peace, despair as well as hope, throughout which Le Nay explores several themes.
 
Foremost is the dreadful toll a child with substance abuse disorder takes on any parent. The story doesn’t try to provide answers, and there is no illusion that Marnie gets it right. In fact, she regularly ponders whether her support for Lenny over the years may have enabled Lenny’s bad behaviour.
 
The question looms large: if she hadn’t been so supportive, might her daughter have been forced to ‘get a backbone’? And perhaps an even more vexing consideration: is it ever okay to give up on a child whose addictions, despite intervention, push both of you towards destitution? Through Marnie’s story, Le Nay suggests it’s near impossible to know if there is a correct way to support an addict, but trying to do so can be tough, solitary, heart-wrenching, unrelenting work.
 
On a brighter note, the importance of human kindness is an unambiguous theme. Marnie endures her fair share of enraging condescension from various caseworkers as she navigates her options. But more important is the heartwarming benevolence she encounters, springing mostly from the sanctuary of the small-town communities she visits across western Victoria – the likes of Horsham, Nhill, Kerang and, of course, Edenhope. Each stop plays an important role in her journey, a reminder of the healing effect of simple kindnesses. Indeed, as Marnie travels from the city to the bush, subtle alterations in her own physical and emotional state seem to parallel the changing landscape.
 
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Edenhope is the way Le Nay captures the frank thoughts of her worldly-wise 60-plus protagonist. At one extremity, when Marnie needs to speak with Centerlink staff, she reflects: When you were young it was easier, you could be miserable and still command a kind of positive presence. Now … these men would judge her as incompetent; worse, pitiable. That’s what happened when you were older. At the other, after a night spent at a local fundraiser at the pub: It never left you, she thought later, lying sleepless in bed. Desire, like an exotic warmth … purposeful yet undirected, a fire that would not go out. Sixty-three years old and lying awake, filled with it.
 
Marnie is likely to be wholly recognisable to many women the world over, yet people like her rarely come to the fore in novels. By many protagonists’ standards, she’s lived a fairly unremarkable life in spite of the ups and downs – she’s stayed mostly to herself, is kind, doesn’t ruffle feathers and above all has put her family’s needs way ahead of her own, without complaint.
 
And all of this makes Marnie – and her quietly courageous story – entirely and compellingly relatable.