Bite Your Tongue
Mrs Angel Rendle-Short said that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel.—Courier Mail, 1975
Bite Your Tongue is a story of great heart. It is the story of a teenage girl’s growing up in Queensland during the 1970s, the daughter of a morals crusader: Angel Rendle-Short / Mother Joy Solider. The tale is thoroughly embedded in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s conservative Queensland; a time of great social change for the whole of Australia.
The narrator’s family is characterised by the fervour of religious fundamentalism and extremism, which manifested itself in Angel’s highly public, right wing activism. Bite Your Tongue is also the story of the daughter as an adult and a writer, facing her mother’s mortality while at the same time ‘discovering’ her in archival materials.
These threads are woven together in a mix of novel and memoir, each informing and illuminating the other with their different voices, making Bite Your Tongue a highly original work. Using this unusual and fascinating form, Francesca presents a personal social history, documenting a strong, conservative protest movement with a very real list of books to ban and to burn.
While harrowing at times, Bite Your Tongue also displays a superb lightness of touch, and a great joy in the power of language. It is an investigation into the very nature of storytelling, displaying great humour and heart.
In Francesca Rendle-Short’s family, silence was golden. So to break ranks and tell stories about her peculiar family life and her mother’s moral crusading should send this daughter straight to hell in a ball of smoke and flame along with all those books her mother wanted to burn. Some stories are hard to tell. But like reading, writing stories changes everything. Set in 1970s Queensland and also contemporary times, Bite Your Tongue is an elegant mix of novel and memoir that is in turn harrowing and delightful. It threads together the childhood story of the fictional Glory Solider, with the thoughts and experiences of the adult author, Francesca Rendle-Short, as she looks more deeply into her mother’s activism at the time of facing her mother’s death. Can a daughter forgive her mother for making her a pawn in her conservative moral crusades? Can greater understanding reinstate love? What does a mother owe a daughter and a daughter a mother?
2011 | ISBN 9781876756963 | Paperback | 230 x 155 mm | 246 pp
Awards
2012 Shortlist: The Colin Roderick Award
Reviews
Bite Your Tongue is by turns entertaining and challenging ... Perhaps most importantly, though, in its structural and figurative modes, Rendle-Short’s narrative lends its voice to a tradition of Queensland women’s writing in a growing cacophony of many tongues.
—Jessica Gildersleeve, Queensland Review
Rendle-Short effectively embraces the hybrid nature of this work, and the transitions between the two narratives are seamless. It is a fascinating and horrifying time in Australian history, brought to life with a deft use of language. You can almost feel the sweat on the kitchen lino and smell the mustiness of the nursing home...
—Kimberely Allsopp, Bookseller & Publisher
What a potent mix—a daughter torn in her loyalties to her overbearing parent, and a mother hell-bent on getting to heaven by banning ungodly school texts. Rendle-Short traverses the remembered minefield with candour, grief and something like wonder.
—Cate Kennedy, author of The World Beneath
A mother-daughter tale unlike any other: this is a feisty, idiosyncratic and original book, full of weird energies and wonderful affections.
—Gail Jones, author of Five Bells
For those seeking the transformative powers of literature, Bite Your Tongue will not disappoint.
—Donata Carrazza, Australian Book Review
I’m always interested in reading generational books about mothers and daughters. What stories from my daughter’s childhood will last the distance into adulthood? By all accounts nothing I do is going to have the long-term effects that Francesca Rendle-Short’s mother has had on her life. Having said that, without her upbringing, readers would have missed out on this unusual and dynamic author... Bite Your Tongue is really a poetic ode to a time gone by and to a relationship that taught acknowledgment. I’ve passed my copy on to my mum, because as Rendle-Short says, ‘reading changes everything.’
—Chris Gordon, Readings
In Bite Your Tongue, Professor Francesca Rendle-Short managed to pull-off a remarkable feat: a fictionalised memoir that moves pretty-well-effortlessly between the directly auto-biographical and the lyricism of good fiction.
—Clare Strahan, Overland
Occasionally, you come across a book written in your mother tongue – not just in the lingua franca of Australian Literature, but one that speaks to you in your very own voice, with its own dialectal idiosyncrasies... Bite Your Tongue is one such book.
—Annette Hughes, Newtown Review of Books
Rendle-Short’s literate rendition of a steamy Queensland childhood, her portrayal of a unique mother-daughter and her creation of a semi-fiction form make this book a must-read.
—Helen Musa, CityNews.com.au
Rendle-Short, awarded novelist and teacher of creative writing, has written this book from the heart, with passion, originality and lyrical intensity...This is a book you may fall in love with, if you remember what it was like to have a moral mother and to be an outsider at school, or if you just value good writing and the uncensored expression of desire and difference.
—Christina Houen, Courier Mail
Indeed, the significance of women writers can be seen in 'Bite Your Tongue', in the way writing describes the consciousness of the new self after the pain of difficult, unseemly families for women.
—Marcus Breen, Australian Women's Book Review
Rendle-Short has created an engaging, unsettling and at times darkly funny account of her childhood that will be of interest to those studying literary representations of mother-daughter relationships.
—Bronwyn Lacken
Memory is always like this in writing. It cannot replicate reality, it can only suggest that the factory of the mind is a network of human connectivities.
—Marcus Breen
Remarkably, for such a complexly structured story, Bite your Tongue, is a very accessible book, partly because Rendle-Short is such an impressive writer. Her prose is sharp and clear and extremely detailed... Bite your Tongue is set in a suburb of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. Its factual grounding accentuates its Australian origin. Yet reading it in west Texas in 2012, I find it frighteningly easy to imagine such a story happening here. I highly recommend this book for all who were daughters and those who to understand us.
—Me, you and books
I thoroughly enjoyed this book … on multiple levels. The writing is good, comprising many of the things that appeal to me – wordplay, lovely rhythm, effective imagery (such as the “tongue” motif). The story is easy to follow, despite changes in voice and chronology (as we flip backwards and forwards from childhood to MotherJoy/Angel’s old age). There are universals about love and forgiveness (real and wished for) between parents and children. And, there is love for books (in all their glory!).
—Whispering Gums