One Minute Crying Time, Barbara Ewing
One Minute Crying Time, Barbara Ewing
List: $28.08 | Sale: $19.65
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One Minute Crying Time

Author: Barbara Ewing

Narrator: Barbara Ewing

Unabridged: 10 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2020

Synopsis

This vivid memoir by well-known New Zealand actor and novelist Barbara Ewing covers her tumultuous childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s — a very different time — and ends in 1962, when she boards a ship for London, to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. It draws heavily on the diaries she kept from the age of twelve, which lead her to some surprising conclusions about memory and truth. Ewing struggled with what would now be diagnosed as anxiety; she had a difficult relationship with her brilliant but frustrated and angry mother; and her decision to somehow learn te reo Maori drew her into a world to which few Pakeha had access. A love affair with a young Maori man destined for greatness was complicated by society's unease about such relationships, and changed them both. Evocative, candid, brave, bright and darting, this entrancing book takes us to a long-ago New Zealand and to enduring truths about love.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Cheryl on December 23, 2020

Dithered and decided on a 3. It's a fascinating 'take' on the 1950s - the decade in which I was born but the decade in which Barbara Ewing is a teenager: the shame about sex, the racism, the sexism and the conventionality. It's brave of Ewing to explore and share her adolescent diaries. Some images s......more

Goodreads review by Brenda on February 07, 2023

Set in NZ during 1951 to 1962, the Barbara of the future (now 84 years old) tells her coming of age story, based her old daily dairies then occasional journal entries. The diaries she then burns? Barbara (born in 1939) grows up in Wellington, with family holidays at Maungatapu, near Taranaki. After......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on July 12, 2024

Enjoyable listen as an audiobook. Really lovely to learn more about growing up in the 50s and 60s. Want to ask Mum some things after listening to this. Lovely story of resilience and coping even when given difficulties. Enjoyed these statements: You can see from their faces that life was not funny. Br......more

Goodreads review by Helen on July 05, 2020

This is such a fabulous book that I loved so much and couldn’t stop reading. Barbara Ewing goes back in time using her diaries as a prompt to cover her early years in New Zealand woven in with observations from her present life in London and her visits back to Aotearoa New Zealand. I never realised......more

Goodreads review by Christine on February 20, 2023

A fascinating insight into coming of age in 1950s New Zealand, by renowned actress Barbara Ewing. The social mores, friendships and connections between Maori and Pakeha, and her tiny group of the reo Maori students at Victoria University. Loved it, and my 70-something mother thought it was excellent......more

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