A life less ordinary

It was a long and winding road strewn with setbacks and trauma that brought Sherman, 50, to Brunswick East via four continents, but having got there, she believes she has found her permanent home.

People may know Sherman through the Monkey Temple, the back part of her house from which she runs her business Happily Made, importing and selling clothing and crafts hand made by Cambodian women, and where she hosts weekly conversations among strangers over cheesecake and chai.

They may know her from her bubbly presence on social media platforms such as the Brunswick Neighbourhood Network  on Facebook.

But they are unlikely to know much of her conversion from religious fundamentalism, her two broken marriages, her struggles with mysterious health ailments and other distressing events that have taken place in her life.

It was from a gnawing desire for people to really know what made her the person she is that Sherman initially began putting pen to paper to tell her story 10 years ago.

“When I turned 40, I said to myself, what do I want for my birthday? And it was to be understood,” she says, sitting in the warm and inviting kitchen that is the hearth of the Monkey Temple. Naturally, there is fresh cheescake on the table.

The fruit of that writing was the first volume of her memoir, Happily Made, which was first published in 2020. That book finished in 2011 when her family was about to move back to Melbourne after two years living in a village in Cambodia.

But the original manuscript was much longer – the size of a Bible, according to Sherman – and she always conceived of a second volume to bring her story up to date.

That second volume has just been published as Happily Never After, and covers the first decade of her life in Melbourne.

It was launched to a packed house at Rumi restaurant in Brunswick East in October. Then, in what seems to be typical of Sherman’s somewhat chaotic life, her publicity plans were disrupted by a new bout of Covid.

If the motivation for the first volume was to explain the events in her life that had led to who she was, the second volume seeks in part to convey some of the wisdom she has gathered from her experiences.

“There’s an analogy of having a baby, there’s definitely a long process of being pregnant with the book and pushing it out, and now comes the hard part of actually getting it out there and raising it.

“I believe it’s a story that is important, and I believe that there’s so many topics that are covered in it that actually can generate conversation.”

Born in Sweden, raised in Israel 

It all begins in southern Sweden, where Sherman’s hippie, drug-addicted New Yorker father had met her mother when he was in exile to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War. When she was born in August 1974, Veronica was their third child within a little over two years (the eventually had six).

Sherman describes her father as “a mixture of a television evangelist and Woody Allen”, and says she grew up in an environment of Jewish angst, religious fundamentalism, fear of sexuality, misogyny and domestic violence. 

When she was 10, the family moved to Israel and completely threw themselves into the Zionist project, even though they had converted to a fundamentalist brand of Christianity years earlier. 

In her late teens, Sherman did two years of compulsory national service in the Israel Defense Forces – including a period when she believes the spy agency Mossad attempted to recruit her – and at the age of 20 migrated to Australia to study theology. 

Ending up in Adelaide, she was married twice before travelling with her second husband and four young children to a small village in Cambodia to join the international development NGO Engineers Without Borders. 

But life in Cambodia was not as blissful or fulfilling as planned, and after two years they returned to Australia to live in Melbourne. Within a week, Sherman discovered her husband had been unfaithful and their marriage splintered. In her late-30s, she found herself a single mother in a new city where she knew very few people. 

Happily Never After tells the story of how Sherman survived in this environment while unravelling the earlier trauma in her life. If all of this sounds overwhelming, Sherman’s writing is matter-of-fact with a minimum of self-pity. What shines through is her resilience and determination in the face of numerous setbacks. 

Part of her journey has also been to abandon the certainties that guided more than half of her life. 

“I used to be so sure and my world was so black and white, and there’s something so wonderful when someone asks me [something], and I say, ‘I don’t know’. 

“I actually feel that there’s so much healing in that for me to not know.  

“I grew up my first 20 years of life with a hyper focus on Heaven: eternity is all about who I could get to Heaven, and I would spend time in Heaven. And my whole focus now is, how do we bring Heaven on Earth? 

“Whatever it is that we’re pining for in Heaven, let’s create that now in micro ways, let’s find small ways to bring Heaven on Earth.”