A voyage around my mother

I am stumped. As a former journalist, writer and now psychologist, I wonder why my book I Only Know Happy People: A Psychologist’s Memoir appears to have made some people unhappy.
When the book was released nationally in June I was visiting my daughter in Brisbane. It was there I noticed Whitcoulls had censored the cover on its website.
The cover is taken from a photograph which hangs in one of Vienna’s most famous galleries, the Albertina. I was in Vienna soon after Covid. My husband took the photo of this widely published and well-known image in Austrian photography. It is in the public domain and can be freely copied. 
I love the photographer’s use of form and light and the sense of mystery, sensuality and maybe impending death. It’s a perfect composition and provides an appropriate dream-like atmosphere. It asks questions that beg for answers we can only provide in an uncertain way. Psychology is a bit like that.
The photograph, Bewegungsstudie, was taken by Rudolf Koppitz in 1927.  He was best known for his use of the nude human figure. Yet nearly 100 years later it has obviously distressed some New Zealanders.
The cover depicts three women dressed in black supporting a naked woman, perhaps the dying swan in Swan Lake. They are dancers from the Vienna State Opera. A naked ballerina? The naked woman was blacked out by Whitcoulls.  
I couldn’t believe it. My distributor contacted Whitcoulls, and the cover photo was uncensored. But in many bookshops, the book is hard to find – not quite under the counter, but it may as well be.
The owner of The Women’s Bookshop in Auckland seemed to take exception to the cover photo. She told me she finds it unsettling although she doesn’t mind naked women. When I visited the shop there was no sign of the book on the shelves.
I am not surprised that the book is selling in Melbourne. Readings Bookshop in Lygon Street, Carlton loved the cover and possibly bought the book because of it. A different story, alas, in New Zealand. There is no sign of it on the NZ Booklovers site. I was told its reviewer found the book “too dark” and not “uplifting enough”. 
I thought New Zealand had grown up since Germaine Greer was arrested and fined for saying bullshit at Auckland Town Hall. I wonder what the people of Vienna would think if they knew what had happened to my memoir and one of its best known photographs. I also wonder what my mother, the writer and publisher, Dame Chris Cole Catley, would have made of it.
Auckland author Graeme Lay was a close friend of my mother. She published his first novel The Mentor. I was worried what he would think as my memoir is critical of my mother; I disliked her for much of her life. I always loved and needed her but she just wasn’t there for me. Graeme wrote to me, “While not a happy story, it is an unflinchingly honest one and very well told.”
My book is about mental health issues, my own and those of my clients, and specifically about attachment disorder – what is likely to happen to you in life if the wiring of your brain is affected by abuse, neglect and trauma in the first three years of life in particular.
It is also about discovering the Māori world in my search for a father I have never known and about my complex relationship with my mother. I was expected to become a journalist like her from an early age. I felt that her love for me was conditional on my becoming a writer and so I did. At 14 I wrote a fortnightly column called ‘Suzie’s Teenbeat’  for the Truth newspaper. It included record reviews of Buddy Holly and Little Richard amongst the paper’s scandalous stories of adultery, messy divorces and fraud.  
Later I worked as a journalist on the Melbourne Age, and then Hong Kong television and BBC radio in London. It was only when I became a psychologist that I felt free from my mother’s influence.
I wonder if my mother, who published more than 140 books, would have published my memoir. I think she would have.
I Only Know Happy People: A Psychologist’s Memoir by Sarah Beck (CopyPress, $33) is available in selected bookstores. It’s a memoir of a counselling psychologist who writes about overcoming despair both in herself and in her clients. She also writes about her relationship with her mother, Dame Chris Cole Catley (1922-2011), who operated Cape Catley Books for 25 years from the Marlborough Sounds and later from Devonport.