Books

Mandy Sayer
No Dancing in the Lift: A Memoir

Mandy Sayer’s memoir No Dancing in the Lift centres on two men she loves: her father, Gerry Sayer, a musician who relinquishes any chance at “uncomplicated happiness for the longer odds of creative contentment”, and her husband, the writer Louis Nowra.

The main story is the final year of her 78-year-old father’s life. She takes him into her apartment in Sydney’s Kings Cross and cares for him as he dies of cancer. She opens in her characteristically straightforward way: “By the time I arrived to clear your flat, you’d been dead 10 days.” It is January 2000. Beneath that no-nonsense approach lies a deep love for a precarious parent. This account of her father’s final gig is beautifully felt and exquisitely expressed. She opens a wardrobe and sees the three-piece cream and tan suit he wore on special occasions. “I could still smell your scent, like cooked oatmeal. I lifted the waistcoat and pressed it to my face, inhaling you one last time.”

This is Sayer’s third family memoir, which are among the best I’ve read. In Dreamtime Alice (1999), the early-20s author tap-dances alongside her jazz drummer father as they busk the streets of New York and New Orleans. Velocity (2005) goes back to her childhood and adolescence.

The title refers to what she and Gerry would do on entering a lift. Lifting a line from an old movie, they’d say “No dancing in the lift” and then dance. When Gerry receives his diagnosis, there is a lift, but there is no dancing. Her father’s treatment reduces him – and her. “Just because you’re sick, it doesn’t give you the right to act like an arsehole!” Yet at the same time she realises he “is threaded into all of my work”.

Gerry’s decline coincides with Mandy meeting Nowra, also a resident of Kings Cross, “all long limbs and wild black curly hair. He didn’t seem so much a man but a force of nature.” The lead-up to what would become their love affair is full of surprises. It’s well known that Sayer and Nowra are fond of chihuahuas. Those uppity pups are central to the reason it took them a long time to live together and it is hilarious to read about. She is recently divorced. He is married. She recalls how the reverberations of one particular conversation “were everywhere. I could hear it in the breezes rustling trees, the cries of cockatoos, the soft percussion of summer rain against windowpanes.”

If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

Transit Lounge, 234pp, $32.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 30, 2025 as "Mandy Sayer, No Dancing in the Lift: A Memoir".

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