“Throughout the decade my mother had spent in and out of custody for a suite of dishonesty offences, she had maintained her innocence. It was a cliché to which I was oblivious. Even once I entered law school, I had still to be disabused of my belief in her. As Red tells Andy in The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Everyone in here’s innocent.’”
So wrote Fernanda Dahlstrom, lawyer and refugee advocate, in a 2018 opinion piece in the Guardian. This gritty paragraph could well serve as the back cover blurb to her recently published memoir, The Framing. This is the story of Dahlstrom’s unusual childhood, of a decade marked by upheaval, subterfuge and, most of all, the frequent incarceration of her mother, Margaret Dahlstrom, for theft and identity fraud.
Margaret, the reader learns, was raised in Balwyn, a Melbourne suburb that’s as solidly middle class as they get. She went to Fintona Girls School and trained to be a teacher. She reads Wuthering Heights as a racist text and pooh-poohs Mallarmé. She so loves everything Swedish that she changes her family name to Dahlstrom and tells her daughter that her frequent visits to university campuses in different states are for her work as a Swedish translator.
Fernanda is eight when Margaret is jailed for the first time. Of this, Dahlstrom writes, “The first thing I remember of that day — night — that you went to jail is being home alone. Somehow, I knew that you were in prison, that Sir [Margaret’s sister] was on her way to get me. I was in Grade Four but my smiling teacher was a world away. Who brought me home from school — the farmer next door? — and what they told me is missing.”
This second person address is an occasional feature of the memoir, as if Dahlstrom is speaking directly to her mother about her childhood experiences in a way she hasn’t been able to in real life. Of visiting her mother in jail for the first time, she writes: “a woman in a blue tracksuit sat at a table, and I saw that it was you. You smiled and it was all wrong. You never wore tracksuits. And you had this weirdly fatalistic look… At some point, you said it was only a bounced cheque.” The adult Dahlstrom drily comments, “No one goes to jail for bouncing a cheque.”
Later in the book, when Dahlstrom visits her grandmother after a long estrangement, the picture becomes clearer. Inside a manila folder in her grandmother’s back room are “yellowed pages covered in handwritten scrawl”: unpaid traffic fines, a student loan defaulted on in 1986, a list of suspended sentences Margaret received in the 1990s. “The trouble started when you were still in kinder,” her grandmother tells her.
Yet Dahlstrom remembers her early childhood as carefree, and Margaret seems to have been constant enough in the first eight years of the author’s life. Only a relatively secure attachment between mother and daughter could explain the resilience and bravery of the author, who, in the decade following her mother’s first jail term, spent several periods — each of weeks’ duration — living on her own: preparing vegan meals, caring for pets, doing well at school, even catching trains unaccompanied from Ballarat to Melbourne to visit her mother in Fairlea prison.
There were interviews with child protective services, and a period of formal foster care with an Adelaide family, from whom the author escaped at her mother’s behest. There were kind families who took her in for a while, but never any sense of stability, largely because Margaret engineered it so.
Perhaps the cruellest blow was Dahlstrom’s long period cut off from Margaret’s family, rendered crueller still by the absence of a father or any family on his side. (She never knew her father.) Margaret’s parents, reasonable and loving, could have provided Dahlstrom with the stable home she lacked, if Margaret had only allowed her to trust them.
The lighter moments in this memoir are largely derived from the excitement of a life on the wrong side of the law. Recalling one of several times her mother gave a false name and address when checking into a motel, Dahlstrom writes, “Using a fake name always gave me a feeling of apprehension, a nervous excitement that we might get discovered, but no one ever blinked an eye. Looking back, I wonder if we took more steps than necessary to cover our tracks and if this was done partly for my benefit. Did the glamour, the thrill of a life on the run make it less likely that I would start to question her claims? It was, undeniably, a lot of fun.”
On a rental application for an apartment in South Yarra, yet another of Margaret’s attempts at a “fresh start,” Margaret lists Dahlstrom’s name as Freja Kenway. When the teenage Dahlstrom protests at the complicated “j” in Freja, Margaret replies, “Sorry. I automatically spelled it the Swedish way.”
Then there are the apparently substantial proceeds of crime: business-class flights to Europe, various houses bought and sold, Dahlstrom’s years at elite private schools, lavish birthday presents, wads of hundred-dollar bills stashed in the wardrobe. Was much of the stolen money never refunded, despite all those stints inside? Clever, erudite Margaret seems to have always been two steps ahead of the police.
As a child, Dahlstrom dreamed of becoming a writer, and her memoir is peppered both with touching letters to her mother in prison and some wonderful excerpts from her stories of a fugitive mother and daughter. “When I dig these old manuscripts out of the overnight bag,” she writes, “I see the events of my life in the mid-’90s writ large in what I always thought of as fantasy.”
This, indeed, is the crux of The Framing: the border between fact and fiction in Dahlstrom’s childhood was far too porous. And many years later, Margaret is still unable to give her the gift of the truth when she asks for it. “You want to humiliate me,” her mother says. Dahlstrom writes, “All the times I had appealed to her to connect this or that piece of the puzzle and we had sat around analysing the past, working towards a hypothesis. How could she brush off all those efforts with not even a sentence to acknowledge it had all been an act?”
The Framing is challenging on several levels. The narrative tends to skip backwards, forwards and sideways in time and place, mirroring a life on the run where nothing is as it seems. As well as the switches into second person voice, the text occasionally splits into two columns on the page. Several people are referred to by pseudonym or nickname only. The title, too, is ambiguous: at first blush it suggests that Dahlstrom, the lawyer, is aiming to convince the reader of her mother’s innocence. But the book gradually gives “framing” a more psychological flavour as it attempts to shape narrative meaning from childhood events.
Reading The Framing is therefore a somewhat destabilising process, perhaps intentionally so. Dahlstrom wants us to feel in some small part what she has struggled with daily: the shaky ground of identity, the perils of trust, the need to remain self-reliant. On one occasion as an adult, when speaking to her then girlfriend, Dahlstrom writes: “I was just so disoriented,” I said, and as the word came out, I felt how perfectly it described me. I had grown up beside a navigational sign, a formative ‘You Are Here’ that pointed decisively in the wrong direction.”
Disorientation is also evoked by Dahlstrom’s assertions about the rights of children. As a young adult, she argues the case for drastically lowering the voting age: “We send ten-year-olds to jail in real life; surely we could talk about the possibility of them voting.” As a newly minted lawyer in Darwin she’s quickly brought face to face with inequities in the legal system, especially for First Nations people of all ages. Citing the abuses at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre she writes, “A rights paradigm solely based on principles of access to education, healthcare and accommodation does nothing to disrupt the fundamentally coercive and disenfranchising nature of adult–child relations.”
Given Dahlstrom’s experiences, this stance isn’t surprising. “When I speak about it now, I often get this reaction: You should never have been left on your own,” she writes. “How to explain that being alone was grand. Empowering… I had what every eleven-year-old wants: adventure. Staying in a motel by yourself, people say, dismayed. Anything could have happened. And I think: a locked door, and an empty room — what could be safer?”
Is Dahlstrom really arguing for eleven-year-olds to run their own lives? Or is this an attempt to avoid the role of victim? She never makes this entirely clear, but if she is to be judged on her actions — excelling at school despite being three years younger than her peers, supporting herself during her tertiary studies, finishing a law degree, never once committing an offence — then the victim role has never been hers.
The reader is bound to ask: given Margaret’s apparently stable and supportive upbringing, her intelligence and capabilities, why did she choose a life of crime? Was it simply the lure of easy money, or perhaps the titillation of it all? It’s tempting to psychoanalyse here, and Dahlstrom makes something of an attempt. Did her mother suffer trauma as a child, she asks? Was the boiling water that burned her chest as a baby the root cause of her behaviour? Solid conclusions aren’t, and perhaps can’t be, provided: in fact, Margaret remains a mystery on every level, shrouded, it appears, even from her daughter.
Shrouded, but intensely powerful. Margaret’s level of psychological manipulation — dare I say, gaslighting — of her daughter is chilling to observe. In an eighteenth-birthday card to Dahlstrom, she writes: “I know there are things about your childhood that you would like to have been different… and there are things that, in retrospect, I wish I had done differently. But there is a lot too that I wouldn’t change and most of all I wouldn’t change anything about you. So however wrong some parts of the past seem, they’ve fitted together somehow as a background to who you are now.” Take that, dear daughter.
Finally, The Framing is also a testament to Dahlstrom’s instinct for finding good people to support her along the way, albeit sometimes at a distance: the parents of childhood friends, the vice-principal at her elite secondary school, a well-known and unnamed fantasy author who encouraged her writing from an early age, wonderfully generous girlfriends, and her mother’s family with whom she’s now reunited. These people have helped her reframe her childhood and adolescence, free from her mother’s influence. Let’s hope that through the writing of this intriguing memoir — a process that would have painful and cathartic in equal parts — she has found clarity and a grounded sense of self. •
The Framing: A Memoir
By Fernanda Dahlstrom | Melbourne University Press | $34.99 | 256 pages
