Melanie
By Melanie Woss
Edited and compiled by Fiona Giles
Picador, 1992
Reviewed by Carolyn Beecham
Melanie Woss committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 17. She was one of 380 young people in Australia, aged between 15 and 24, who took their own lives in the same year. She was also an extraordinary young talent whose letters, journals, poetry and stories reveal a height of perception and depth of feeling which will, thanks to their publication in this book, touch many people profoundly.
Young adulthood is difficult. It is a time when simple childish morals and ideals collide with the impossible contradictions and tawdry compromises of mainstream "grown up" lives. I still have the notebooks in which I scrawled my disappointment and rage at the hypocrisy of adults, the emptiness of human existence and the hopelessness of trying to remain sane in an insane world. Sometimes I still feel that way. Mel Woss felt it strongly, and could see no way out.
"Last month five children killed themselves", she wrote in her journal in September 1988. "We can't ask them why, or offer them support. It's too late they're dead and gone. But society doesn't seem to realise. It looks for cures for the symptoms, instead of facing the problem. The problem is that some children don't want to live anymore ... A misconception is that someone who commits suicide is not facing up to reality. Well, that's wrong. I believe people commit suicide because they question what is happening. They ask what is the meaning to all this, the purpose? They question reality, glare it in the face."
Melanie certainly faced reality, although it was the wholly morbid reality of a person only just acquainted with the "adult" world. Like so many teenagers she took the world on her shoulders and it bore her down. Through her writing we can glimpse an intellect too strong to be deflected from her observations of a harsh reality by the "normal" teenage distractions of schoolwork and social life provided by her upper-middle class existence as a student at Perth's Methodist Ladies' College .
In a letter to a schoolteacher, in October 1988, she writes: "You are right. I am angry. Very, very angry. I hate what is going on around me and inside me. I hate having so little influence over problems to which I can see solutions but I cannot implement them. I am either too young, inexperienced, do not possess the right qualifications or whatever. Yes, I do get angry, and people who I am meant to communicate this anger to, like ... [my] shrink ... sit in their stuffy little offices in their stuffy old worlds and suggest I play more sports. I want to say fuck off, you do not help me, but they see this as a sign of my madness. Catch 22. If I were insane I wouldn't know of the problems of my community. If I do kick up about the flaws in my environment they call me insane. Its all bullshit, bullshit, bullshit."
Melanie was clearly depressed. Her own definition of depression was ".. the inability to see the positive side of anything". She resented, however, the suggestion that all she suffered from was an "illness" or clinical condition: "Father says suicide is a symptom of a disease. I have a sick mind. Well, I think that's one hell of a label to put on anybody." She wrote in the same letter, "To me, telling someone they are mentally sick does not do much to raise their level of self-esteem".
How seriously do adults take teenage depression? My recollection is that I became a kind of family joke: "The Thing That Lurks in its Bedroom". Luckily I was soon able to share my feelings with other, similarly angst-ridden, young people. We read poetry to each other, listened to depressing music in darkened rooms and finally became politically active, daring to believe in the basic goodness of each other and developing that belief into a hope for a better future.
In her introduction to Melanie, Fiona Giles says, "Human survival depends on positive forward-thinking, the ability to make plans based on a commitment to an adult, reproductive future". She also points out that Australia has one of the highest teenage suicide rates in the world and that the rate has increased dramatically over the past 25 years. For Australians between the ages of 15 and 24 it is now the second highest cause of death, after motor vehicle accidents.
Melanie Woss mentions nuclear war as one of her fears. Today children are also faced with a Third World that is starving to death, wars in every corner of the globe and a planet on the brink of ecological disaster. Survival requires that we either blot out these realities or work, with others, to make a better future.
Melanie solved nothing by dying. After reading the book I was left with the feeling that she didn't want to die, and that if she had just hung on a little longer, the positive aspects of the world and of her own path would have become clearer to her. Her death was, and is, a tragedy.
Fiona Giles and Picador are to be congratulated for presenting her work in this book. As Giles writes, "Melanie's ... power as a writer lay in her ability to describe with clarity and sensitivity commonly experienced feelings and fears. As a representative teenager she has given those who remain silent a resonant and lucid voice."