I Don't Need Therapy: (and other lies I've told myself)

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You could argue that technically, you could drive from Perth to the Gold Coast, but it would be awful. You could also argue that there are more places within driving distance from Perth than Broome, but let’s not get caught up in the finer details. While they were there, they went to the Happs Winery and really enjoyed a rosé called Fuchsia, so they bought heaps of bottles that gathered dust in the house, but still more were acquired in bulk on each trip. My dad isn’t a big fan of flying. I remember asking Mum and Dad if we could go on a family holiday on a plane, like the other kids, and Dad said, ‘Toni, if we could drive there, we’d have been everywhere already!’ Every year, we’d do the same activities, like visit the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park, watch a film at the Sun Pictures outdoor cinema, visit the Courthouse Markets and eat hot cinnamon donuts, have lunch at The Roey, play minigolf at the course outside the caravan park convenience store, get an ice-cream from the ice-creamery, play cards and Balderdash, visit the Broome Gaol and surf every day. Why fix what’s not broken? (A lot of very niche Broome-based references in there. Shout out to anyone reading this who knows what I’m talking about, i.e. my siblings and any friends or boyfriends who got dragged along on a Lodge Broome Adventure.) I’m a pretty well-adjusted person. When it comes to change, I’m not too bad. After years of therapy and lots of effort and brain-retraining, I have become pretty good at taking on new circumstances. But there were many years when I was not like that, and now, I know why.

The second dress didn’t fit—and of course it was my favourite of the three. Babe Girl banged on the wall next to me and asked if I need any more sizes or any help zipping up, to which I replied, "No thanks, all good!" As we were getting ready to go, Mum grabbed her coat. ‘Mum I don’t think we’ll need coats, hey?’ I said. ‘We’ve ended up carrying them every day and they’re so heavy!’ In this hilarious warm hug of a book, Toni exposes the lies she has told herself about who she is and what she is capable of, inviting you on a riotous romp that will make you laugh, cringe, cry and utterly rethink the truth behind the stories we tell ourselves. We flew from Perth to Singapore, then on to Heathrow. We spent five days in London, five days in Paris, then five days in Euro Disney, and wrapped up with three days in Singapore. Anyway, that specific relateability of Toni's story wasn't the only reason that I enjoyed this book. It was like sitting down with a friend-of-a-friend who you only sort of know over some beers and really getting to know them well. The conversational tone, the honesty about the good and bad, and the humour all made this an engaging read.We went to Broome every year. Every single July school holidays, we would drive 2068.2 kilometres, or 1285.1 miles, or 23 hours and eight minutes, to get to Broome.

On our third morning, we woke up, filled ourselves with pastries and cheese and got ready to see the Eiffel Tower. Of course, we’d seen it from far away, but this day we were going to climb the stairs and go all the way to the tippy-top! She followed up by saying, "Like, honestly, I’ve seen so many girls try that one on and you look gorgeous in it! And so versatile too, you’ll get so much wear out of that one! What’s the occasion?" The biggest moments that have stayed with me were from Toni sharing stories of her family and losing her from all accounts incredible mum. It made me as a Mother and daughter think of moments in my life with my own Mum but also of the boys and the memories they’d have of growing up with me, if I can be half the Mum it sounds like Toni’s was, I’d be be pretty happy with that because she sounded absolutely out the gate amazing. The prize was two nights away at a hotel called Caves House in Margaret River, the wine region of southern Western Australia. So Mum and Dad went down and enjoyed the weekend so much that they went to the same hotel on two more occasions. I think another reason I loved it so much is I was able to relate to SO much of what she talked about. Now we all know Toni Lodge as being absolutely hilarious all of the time, but she talks about her deep feelings of loss in this book too so be ready for that. I think she did it beautifully and I actually want to recommend this book to anyone who may have lost a parent.

The biggest aspect of this book is how Lodge handles the loss of her mother to cancer, and she does a superb job. More than once I was brought to tears (which isn't saying a whole lot because I tend to leak water from the eyes a lot when reading compelling stuff). She goes into a lot more depth about her mother's passing than she does in the podcast, probably due to the more methodical medium of a book when contrasted with a podcast. Like most of us, Toni Lodge tells little white lies all the time. Whether it's 'I'm five minutes away' or 'It must have gone to my spam folder', most of these innocent fibs are harmless. But what if you realised that you weren't just lying about the little things, but the big 'life' stuff too? I knew it wasn’t Babe Girl’s fault, but I was starting to get a bit hot. I abandoned ship and tried on the third dress. It fit me perfectly and actually looked really nice. Conservative and 'funeral-ly', but still me. I walked out of the change room and my sisters all smiled sweetly and told me how nice I looked. I was in a cesspool of emotion, worrying if I’d ever recover, but also fussing over flowers and trying to find the time to call people who needed to know that Mum’s funeral was that week and then also politely responding to someone saying, "I’m so sorry," with something along the lines of, "Thank you, that’s okay!" I was expecting the laughs, and there are plenty of those, but what I wasn't expecting is that Toni lost her mum to a brain tumour when she was young. Same here. The way she wrote about the grief in the aftermath of losing her mum was the first time (in over 15 years) that I felt like there was someone else out there who genuinely got the way I had felt. So that was impactful for me personally.