Podcast Episode: My Mother, Joanie

Pip: Ask Brett is where brett hayhoe writes about the things that actually shaped him — and this time, that means going back to the very beginning.

Mara: Today we're in the World Traveller series, the Relationships chapter, and the subject is the woman at the center of it all: his mother, Joanie.

Pip: Let's start with the portrait itself.

My Mother, Joanie

Pip: This segment is about what it means to reconstruct a relationship from memory — the early warmth, the rebellious years, the loss — and what survives when the details start to blur.

Mara: Brett sets the frame right at the top, and it's worth reading directly: "There is a particular kind of love that exists between a boy and his mother — one that resists easy description. Some of what follows may not be entirely accurate. It is based on memory — and memory, as I have learned, is not always a reliable narrator."

Pip: So the whole piece is already doing something honest before it's done anything else — it's not claiming to be a documentary. It's claiming to be true in the way memory is true.

Mara: And the stories that follow bear that out. He was an unplanned pregnancy his father didn't know about until a chance encounter at a clinic. His mother's response to the family pushing for Mervyn Walter Jr. was, quote, "Over my dead body." He became Brett instead.

Pip: That one line tells you everything about Joanie as a character before she's even properly introduced.

Mara: The childhood he describes is genuinely happy — weekends at his sister's cane farm in Mossman, a large extended Queensland family, a close relationship with his mother. Then a guard dog attack at a family visit nearly costs him his life, a tooth mark on his skull and another a millimetre from his jugular.

Pip: And Joanie's response to her son nearly losing his face was to buy him a ventriloquist doll. Which is either inspired parenting or the most Queensland solution to a trauma ever recorded.

Mara: He notes, with some dry acknowledgment, that because he couldn't open his mouth far to speak, he actually got quite good at it. The teenage years bring two set pieces — being packed off to his sister Rae's after a silent treatment standoff, then fetched back less than a week later, and a late-night Mini versus gutter situation that ended with both siblings conscripted to help their father pull the engine apart.

Pip: The car story lands as comedy, but underneath it is a father teaching his kids how things work. That detail earns its place.

Mara: The piece ends where it has to. His mother's passing in his mid-twenties, and this: "Not a day goes by that I don't think about her in some way, shape, or form. She played such a pivotal role in my life, and life since her passing has never quite been complete."

Pip: He closes by wishing he could remember more. That's the whole essay in four words.

Mara: Memory as an unreliable narrator, love that resists easy description — these are the themes that stay with you.

Pip: Next time, more from the Relationships series. Some stories you need a little distance to tell.