Megan Dunn’s mermaid novel The Mermaid Chronicles is a haunting, moving and funny search for the meaning of mermaids and the anchor points of interests and family in the ups and downs of life.
What is more important to you than praise and sympathy? This question preoccupied me while writing The Mermaid Chronicles. I read this question in a book called Big game by Tara Mohr, which I found on my mother’s turquoise-painted bookshelf. Big game is a motivational book for women. According to Tara, it’s about being more true to your dreams than your fears. On the cover, the title is in a cursive font, as if it were handwritten, to add a personal touch, and the letters are colored turquoise.
Do you like turquoise? Do I like turquoise? Yes, but it’s complicated. Turquoise is the color of the quotes and slogans about mermaids that I’ve been collecting from the internet for years. Like this one: “I must be a mermaid because I’m not afraid of the deep and very afraid of a superficial life.” My mother gave me this quote by Anais Nin on a plaque.
But my mother originally liked purple. Seriously. When I was a teenager, my mother had a purple bedspread at home, a purple sheepskin rug like a shorn doll, and a purple lampshade hanging from the ceiling with purple tassels dripping down, casting the room in mauve shadows. Mom also liked to quote the poem “When I’m old I’ll wear purple.” Jenny Joesph wrote that poem when she was only 28, and apparently she hated purple. Oh, Jenny.
Later in life, Mom switched to turquoise! She bought a small, used turquoise car. “I just love that color!” She chose turquoise clothes and rings and sometimes marveled at me: “Megan, now I like turquoise.” As if her whole personality had changed.
What does my mother have to do with mermaids? That’s another question that completely stumped me as I was writing. The Chronicles of the Mermaid. Honestly, the answer has to be zero. Mom wasn’t a competitive swimmer like some of the parents of the best mermaids. Neither was I. At best, Mom paddled with dogs and occasionally sat in the bathtub. Neither was I. And neither of us were ever beautiful mermaids, which is a shame. Mom didn’t even have long hair!
But in 2022, as I sat at my desk in my office at IIML, perched high on the hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, memories of my mother kept interrupting my mermaid book. I was playing with a small jute bag full of cards tied with a dainty blue bow. The bag was turquoise, I opened it and looked through my mother’s wisdom pearl cards. That’s what she called her affirmation pack. Each card depicted a pearl sitting in an oyster with the shell half open, like a makeup compact. The cards said things like: I take care of myself by eating healthy. I give myself time to heal. Mom wanted these cards to be bought and read by an audience, she wanted to help people – presumably women – feel better. She wanted to feel better.
Above my desk I had my faded print of Waterhouse’s A mermaid. She looked down at me, wondering if I would ever sort my shit out. “You alone, Megan, are called to explain to people why mermaids have such long hair, what we eat, what we say to children, and how we save the world,” she said, her brush catching on a knot.
“I know, but what did my mother know about damn oysters, nothing?” I fumed. “And what do pearls have to do with wisdom anyway?”
“There are five different kinds of pearls,” Waterhouse’s mermaid replied. “Akoya, Tahitian, freshwater, white and gold South Sea and Gulf of California. They are graded like batteries. AAA is the best.”
On the floor was a large turquoise binder containing printouts of all my mermaid interviews. Over 60 mermaids. Over 800,000 words. That’s a lot of pearls of wisdom.
I’m in the biggest womb in the world. I’m in this amniotic fluid that surrounds the entire planet. There’s the ceiling and there’s the floor and I could stay in there forever. – Mermaid Linden
I want to be dazzled, I want to see things I’ve never seen before, I want to explode in an atom bomb of fun and happiness. – MeduSirena
The first year I showed up, I heard this really deep male voice screaming, “She’s real, she’s real!” – Mermaid Rachel, Dive Bar, Sacramento.
I always want children to show me their toes. Toes simply fascinate me. – Morgana Alba, Circus Siren Pod.
The people on my team are stuntwomen, freedivers and elite athletes. To do this work, where you can be hired to work on set in a hover for eight hours, you have to be incredibly athletic and have a huge commitment to your craft. – Merman Jax, Dark Tide Entertainment.
If I have given birth to a child, I can certainly learn this. – Mermaid Karin, Blue Planet Copenhagen.
Overwhelmed, I left my desk and went upstairs to visit the poet Chris Price in her office. She has written a book about lobsters and God knows I admire her for it.
“I sense that you want to save the mermaids from banality,” she said, sitting down at her desk.
“Yes! I think I want to save myself from banality,” I replied.
A woman in her 40s who writes a book about people who work as mermaids is not taken seriously. Instead, she gets a lot of memes and a lot of links to crocheted mermaid tail blankets.
What is more important to me than praise and sympathy? My mother, my daughter. The truth that shimmers like a pearl that I pulled from the sea and held in my hand. What the mermaids told me. A world in which there was still hope, that was blossoming.
In The Chronicles of the Mermaid I set out to find the mermaids’ song. I wanted an adventure into tumbling femininity, into a sea of turquoise quotes. So I followed Tara Mohr’s advice. I travelled to Copenhagen with my partner Rich and our then two-year-old daughter in tow. Does the Little Mermaid statue actually have a tail or feet? I know it does. When Adrienne Rich wrote her groundbreaking feminist poem:Diving into the wreck’ did she swim at the Wreck Bar in Florida? No, but I did. I bought a Madison tail and chased after Daryl Hannah, my GOAT mermaid. I did things I never thought I would do and looked and felt stupid doing it, but that was more important to me than praise or sympathy. I wanted to know what it felt like to be a mermaid from the inside out.
It’s absolute freedom, it’s weightlessness… when we’re underwater, we’re dedicated to our spiritual form. Energetically, you can feel the currents flowing through you, it’s like coming home. – Hannah, mermaid.
I’m 49 years old now, and I’m sitting here writing this in pajamas with hydrangeas on them (purple). But if you want to know how long it takes to create a pearl of wisdom, my answer is simple: your whole life.
“The Mermaid Chronicles” by Megan Dunn ($35, Penguin NZ) is available from Unity Books.
