Every Day is Gertie Day by Helen Meany
“There’s still no avoiding young Gertrude’s unsettling stare, however, as she clutches the skeletal animal and scowls out at the world, as if everything - the left side of her face, mangled and scarred, and those huge pointed ears, the fact that she’s there on a bag at all - are somehow all your fault.”
Helen Meany’s debut book, Every Day is Gertie Day, won the 2021 Viva La Novella Prize and very nearly slipped completely past my radar. The fabulous cover art caught my eye, and if ever there was a book to be judged by its cover - this is it. It has, without a doubt, gone down as one of my favourite reads in recent years.
Meany sinks her hook in deep with the opening line of chapter one - “It began with the death house on Regency street” - and there’s no putting this book down from there.
We’re introduced to Nina, a tour guide for the Thrift House Museum and Hetty P. Clarke Overlooked Artists Gallery. The house belonged to one Gertrude Thrift, a relative nobody until she was found deceased inside her home, years after her passing. The collective confusion and fear over an elderly woman being left dead and unnoticed for so long is only elevated when it’s discovered Gertrude was the sitter for a series of all-but-forgotten paintings from the 1950s, ‘Girl With Greyhound’, by local artist Hetty P. Clarke.
Gertrude was left with facial scarring after being attacked by a champion greyhound when she was a young girl. The paintings may have been interesting enough on this detail alone, except there’s one significant addition. In the paintings, Gertrude has giant elf ears.
The story of Gertrude and her ears goes viral, and quickly, young people are adopting elf ears of their own. What begins with fake appendages escalates to ever more precise surgical procedures as more and more people become wrapped up in the phenomenon. Elf ear adopters become convinced that Gertrude authentically had her ears surgically changed to look like elf ears:
“Which, if you followed its logical conclusion, assumed that Gertrude, a working-class factory girl in early 1950s Sydney, successfully procured a surgeon not only willing but also skilled enough to carry out such a procedure. It did seem beyond ridiculous. But the idea had taken hold.”
The idea takes hold mainly owing to a line found in Hetty’s journal of her experience painting Gertrude stating, “Gertrude’s got her damned elf ears” and an ambiguous grainy photo that seems to show an ‘elf ear like’ shape beneath a headscarf Gertrude is wearing.
This might all sound a bit thin for the plotline of an entire book, but Meany pulls it off with not only a wildly fantastic imagination but a gripping narrative too. As the furore around the authenticity of Gertrude’s ears grows, and divisions between Gertie’s and non-Gertie’s reaches fever pitch, Nina finds herself at the centre of a tangled web of conspiracy theories.
Urging Nina to dig deeper and deeper to uncover the truth, she is faced with a complex and potentially futile decision:
“I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with what I was now in possession of, but I was fairly sure what it would mean to them. I hadn’t thought the next part through. I’d only been concerned with confirming their existence.”
The beauty of Every Day is Gertie Day is how the bizarre events surrounding the paintings, the museum and Nina are all so close to the bone of things happening in our own reality. The novel is set in a not-too-distant future against a backdrop of climate change and pollution, extreme socio-economic disparities, and a media beast bent on controlling and skewering the population’s perspective. Meany ever-so-subtly drip feeds the reality into the story; that the prominence of the Gertie wars in the news is simply a misdirection, leading people away from alarming issues happening right on their doorstep:
“I clicked through the first couple of minutes, protestors mouthing off, museum visitors door stopped, then in the last few seconds, the woman, just like baby ears described, jumps in front of the reporter with a sign: THIS IS A DISTRACTION.”
Tying everything together are the well-developed relationships that Nina finds herself enmeshed in. A die-hard Gertie called Gwen, who’s developed a profitable business hosting other Gertie’s in an AirBnB near the museum, befriends Nina, but more to boost her own credentials than anything else. Although Nina’s aware of this, she still can’t resist the allure of being important:
“The truth was I’d missed her chirpy hellos at work and afternoon check-in messages. I missed feeling like I mattered to someone outside my home.”
The revealing of the truth is saved for the last few chapters and Meany does a superb job of keeping us guessing - I flipped and flopped between believing the ears to be authentic or not, so robust are the arguments from either side. This is an excellent portrait of how easy it is to get swept up in confirmation bias, selecting the facts to suit our own desired beliefs, and how you can always find an ‘expert’ to support your views - one way or another.
I also found all of Meany’s characters to be vivid, realistic portrayals and for anyone who’s worked for a government or state-run entity, you’ll also find the depictions of what this is like are spot on. I found myself nodding and smiling along many times as I remembered similar experiences handling management, admin, and the mundane repetitions that often come with some of this work.
This is an intelligent, highly entertaining, and impeccably delivered story, well worth your time.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
