The Mermaid Chronicles
by Megan Dunn

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? I couldn’t care less. Video art? Okay, I could care less. Mermaids? Mercy me. It’s a mark of a good writer if they can get you to read and enjoy subjects in which you have zero interest. Megan Dunn is such a writer. I would read her on anything and follow her writing anywhere. Sometimes I feel as though I have, so varied are her own interests. Even in the space of a single book.

And so, after Fahrenheit 451 (and everything else) in her first book, Tinderbox (2017), and video art (and everything else) in her second, Things I Learned at Art School (2021), Dunn brings us The Mermaid Chronicles: A Midlife Mer-moir, and once again I was with her every step of the way.

The key here is ‘mer-moir’ and not only because it indicates Dunn’s taste for groansome puns (even a good writer has their weaknesses). Just as Tinderbox was a book about writing a book about Fahrenheit 451 (or rather not writing one), The Mermaid Chronicles is a book about writing a book about mermaids (or rather not writing one). With her postmodern proclivities and tendency toward the meta (or should that be mer-ta?), along with her frequent comic undercutting of moments before they become too serious or sincere, Dunn comes at subjects side on and at one remove.

So, although we get lots of mermaids, we get a lot of Dunn too: her travels and travails as she follows the mermaid ‘scene’ via online interviews and trips to the US and Denmark; but also her life and relationships with her partner, daughter and mother – the latter of which, in its earlier years, featured in Things I Learned at Art School.

The mermaids themselves are to be found far and wide in cultural history and around us today. No, I’m not a believer in the real thing, but after this book I’m a firm believer in the people who dress and swim as mermaids, professionally and/or for the personal attraction of the myth and the experience. As one of the American mermaid performers tells Dunn:

It takes so much work to make what we do look effortless. It’s awful and there’s cramping and sun and chlorine, so many things. A thirty-pound tail and people say, ‘Oh, you just sit there.’ No, I don’t just sit there. Trust me, you couldn’t do what I do. If it was so easy everyone would do it.

But as they also say (mermaids can be as contradictory as anyone else):

That said, I do genuinely think that anyone can be a mermaid […] Whatever makes you happy. If you want to buy a tail and swim whether it’s for exercise, or for recreation or if it just makes you happy, don’t explain any reason why you want to do that. Have fun and enjoy yourself and grab whatever happiness you need in this life.

Words to live – or swim – by.

Dunn’s own attraction to the subject, which also featured in Things I Learned at Art School, started as a girl with one of the ur-texts of the mermaid world, the 1984 film Splash starring Daryl Hannah as the finned Madison. An interview with Hannah is Dunn’s holy grail and her travels include to Copenhagen to visit the statue of The Little Mermaid honouring another ur-text, written by the city’s Hans Christian Andersen.

One mermaid – or mermaid-adjacent – myth involves selkies: seals who slip out of their skins and become women. Dunn recounts the legend of a selkie whose skin is stolen by a fisherman she marries and has two children with. However, when she finds the hidden skin, she returns to the sea. ‘I liked selkies,’ writes Dunn, ‘because they were ambivalent about marriage.’

The selkie is a powerful metaphor throughout the book: Dunn sheds her own skin to write with sometimes raw candour about herself and her family. Her self-mockery escalates at times to self-denigration of her body that borders on self-flagellation, revealing her discomfort in her own skin. Less shedding than shredding. I write this as a male reader, of course; a woman might well shrug and say, ‘But of course.’

Dunn captures the contours of domestic life beautifully – its ups, its downs; its contentment and discontents. There were a couple of times I had to check the dedication at the front and acknowledgements at the back to see if she is still with her partner, so tense was their relationship. (She is.) At other times, I wondered if they’d adopt a 59-year-old book reviewer as a second child, so warmly and appealingly does Dunn describe their set-up.

The heart of the book is its depiction of mothers and daughters – Dunn’s relationship with her mother, Dunn’s relationship with her daughter, and Dunn’s mother’s relationship with Dunn’s daughter. None of these relationships is easy; what relationship ever is? Dunn draws them with honesty and pinpoint accuracy – their joys, their frustrations, and that mass of life in between.

With her daughter, Fearne, Dunn takes us from her IVF treatment and Ferne’s birth through to whatever age Fearne is at the book’s end – 10? 40? She might as well be, as during the course of the book she comes to increasingly replicate Dunn’s turns of phrase and sardonic sensibility.

With her mother – Mum throughout – Dunn picks up the threads of what we know from Things I Learned at Art School and takes us up to her death from cancer, funeral and the things that continue to live on alongside us after a parent dies. It’s a tricky relationship to which Dunn does complete justice, with exactly the right balance of humour and poignancy.

Dunn’s is a siren-like voice able to take readers from the shallows of her cheesy jokes (‘Are mermaids feminists? Yes. But which wave?’) to the depths of places like this. Not to mention encouraging strained mermaid imagery in reviewers. Can I throw in briny while I’m at it? There’s a pleasing saltiness to Dunn’s writing. A book like this could easily become twee and cosy. Whenever it threatens to, Dunn pulls the rug out. ‘Cheekiness is one of my favourite vices,’ she writes. She can’t resist making everyone laugh. She is ‘that one annoying person in the group who couldn’t keep her big trap shut’. Only occasionally is this wearisome – because her quips are good and she does make you laugh. For Dunn, it’s ‘all the stuff you would usually edit out. That’s what interests me’.

And that’s what interests her readers. Her lack of inhibition (no moment is embarrassing enough to skate over); her intelligence and unique take on things. Dunn’s use of language is only part of that, but it’s as good a part as any to end on. A maternity ward nurse has ‘a hard, tense face like an acorn’, a banker is ‘good-looking in a semi-Patrick Bateman kind of way’.

It’s only a word but it’s also a proxy for everything else that makes Dunn so interesting a writer – during her emergency C-section for Fearne’s birth, a doctor tests her reflexes to ensure the drugs are working:

‘Can you feel this?’ he said, prodding his way along my body.

‘Nn-negligible,’ I stuttered. My teeth were clattering so bad I could hardly get words out.

The staff in the operating theatre all cracked up.

‘Wwwhat?’ I asked.

‘That’s a new one. No one’s ever said ‘negligible’ before,’ the doctor replied.