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'One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn’s dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her.
'Thirty Days is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark’s wife of 33 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer.
'It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn’s letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate. In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on finding the path to a peaceful death. Paradoxically, her dying brings the couple back to the intensity of their first love.
'In the tradition of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Airand Cory Taylor’s remarkable memoir, Dying, Mark Baker’s Thirty Days is an inspirational book about death and dying.' (Publication Summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Diaspora Memory-Objects
2021
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue , October no. 63 2021; 'Objects are not just ‘objects’ but are connected to people and memory. My paper asks: how can objects help authors write from diverse experiences? I answer this question through a diasporic lens. Objects of ritual have strong importance in Judaism and cultural objects are often passed down throughout the generations. I analyse examples from writers, theorists, and curators, including Mark Baker and his memoir Thirty Days (2017); object theorist Bill Brown; Mireille Juchau and her essay ‘The Most Holy Object in the House’; postmemory theorists Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer; curator Alla Sokolova; Marie Kondo and her use of the Japanese term ‘mono no aware’ (the pathos of things), and my own poetry collection Amnesia Findings (2019). Through this research, I arrive at a closer understanding of how objects can help writers respond to complex and hybrid experiences using memory-objects, and by writing through Things.' (Publication abstract) -
No Magic Can Turn Back Loss
2017
single work
column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23 September 2017; (p. 25)'Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” After the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she examines grief the way a writer examines anything: “In times of trouble … read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” Mark Raphael Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Monash University, began writing Thirty Days after the death of his wife, Kerryn Baker. Like Didion’s, his work is framed by a motif of magic and the quest for a kind of cognitive trick that might turn back loss.' (Introduction)
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No Magic Can Turn Back Loss
2017
single work
column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23 September 2017; (p. 25)'Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” After the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she examines grief the way a writer examines anything: “In times of trouble … read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” Mark Raphael Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Monash University, began writing Thirty Days after the death of his wife, Kerryn Baker. Like Didion’s, his work is framed by a motif of magic and the quest for a kind of cognitive trick that might turn back loss.' (Introduction)
-
Diaspora Memory-Objects
2021
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue , October no. 63 2021; 'Objects are not just ‘objects’ but are connected to people and memory. My paper asks: how can objects help authors write from diverse experiences? I answer this question through a diasporic lens. Objects of ritual have strong importance in Judaism and cultural objects are often passed down throughout the generations. I analyse examples from writers, theorists, and curators, including Mark Baker and his memoir Thirty Days (2017); object theorist Bill Brown; Mireille Juchau and her essay ‘The Most Holy Object in the House’; postmemory theorists Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer; curator Alla Sokolova; Marie Kondo and her use of the Japanese term ‘mono no aware’ (the pathos of things), and my own poetry collection Amnesia Findings (2019). Through this research, I arrive at a closer understanding of how objects can help writers respond to complex and hybrid experiences using memory-objects, and by writing through Things.' (Publication abstract)
