lip lit: marieke hardy, you’ll be sorry when i’m dead

You’ll Be Sorry When I’m Dead is quite an ominous title for someone to choose for a memoir. However, when you’ve been on the receiving end of death threats and frequent tirades from angry right-wingers, you can afford to sound a little intimidating sometimes. In this collection of reminiscent essays, journalist, screenwriter and general public menace, Marieke Hardy, unleashes her teeth-and-nails type of hilarity in all its ferocity. Unabashedly, she recounts her trajectory from child actor, to Fitzroy Football Club fangirl, to one-time swingers’ party participant, to raging hedonist, through to the stalwart of Melbourne’s cultural scene she is today.

Hardy seems to have no qualms about making her readers cringe, or, more accurately, screw up their faces, blink hard and tilt their heads to one side in a did I just read that kind of way. The memoir is prefaced by a rather sweet introduction penned by Hardy’s father, turn a few pages and you’re slapped with wistful reminiscences of teenage masturbation. Further in and we’re treated to graphic descriptions of stickily awkward swingers orgies and fleeting brushes with the world of prostitution.

Similarly hedonistic Melbournians will appreciate descriptions of drunken evenings spent scamming piggy-backs off gentlemen friends outside The Tote, and retellings of Fitzroy gigs in the mid-90s where everyone ‘sat on the floor gazing up with a sort of dumb intensity, or leaped about in front of the stage as though poked with an electric cattle prod in the name of being “a free spirit”’; this sense of location-specificity is integral to Hardy’s work.

She professes to admire writing that is intensely personal, and that seems to have been achieved here, albeit a fragmented kind. Freely discussing her not-entirely-conventional upbringing, ‘our house was a naked one’, she offers amusing reflections about her parents, stating of her mother:  ‘she tap-danced when she was heavily pregnant [with Marieke], an activity she often rudely and publicly states “explains a great deal”’.

Perhaps wanting to eradicate any potential bitterness, Hardy applies the interesting concept of offering a right-of-reply to the people discussed throughout her lewd anecdotes. So, accompanying the essays, we are offered further insight from Hardy’s friends and ex-lovers (and hero, Bob Ellis). Interestingly, one of her ex-boyfriends writes ‘My only criticism, as a writer, would be, if you’re going to share then don’t hold back. Because it seems you want to share Marieke the caricature, when the soul of the Marieke that I knew, in dark, hard times, well, she was a real person. And a lovely one at that.’

So whether we can in fact gauge a full picture of the writer behind the thickly applied smear of self-deprecating humour is debateable. However, it is because of Hardy’s wit that the prose is propelled along and sustained when, at times, it seems to teeter on the edge of the self-indulgent territory that memoirs can sometimes seep into.

If any of the terms, sarcastic, charmingly alcoholic, or mildly grotesque, could be used to describe your sense of humour, then you and Marieke Hardy will get along just swimmingly.