Oona Frawley & Katie Goh

‘I would always be the child who heard of home as something far off in place and time. I would be the visiting relative with the different accent, the different language, the relative who lived in a rented apartment and was surprised to learn that it was possible to buy the places where one lived. I would always be uneasy, hoping that I was smiling in the right places.’ Oona Frawley 

How do we live when our loved ones are dying? How do we make sense of the world in their wake? And how are such losses countered by birth? In This Interim Time Oona Frawley witnesses her mother’s descent into dementia at the same time as her dear friend is stricken with cancer. Following their deaths, she is forced to reconsider the death of her father in New York decades earlier. While grieving, she parents two young children who bring such joy that the state of loss is always seesawing with that of profound gratitude for the present. 

In Foreign Fruit, her distinct, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation – and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds. The orange’s odyssey parallels Katie’s search for her own heritage and, drawing on her family history as well as extensive travel and research, she follows it from east-to-west and west-to-east – from Longyan, China, to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur and the groves of California. 

The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, it has been a harbinger of God and doom, fortune and failure, pleasure and suffering. It is a fruit containing metaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables and histories within its tough rind. So, what happens when the fruit is peeled and each segment – each moment of history, each meaning in time – is pulled apart?