Biography and memoir
Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters by Brigitta Olubas & Susan Wyndham (eds)
Those who read the extract from Hazzard and Harrower in the April Readings Monthly will not be surprised to see it recommended here in the month of its release. While that small sample could hardly convey the astonishing scope of…
Did I Ever Tell You? by Genevieve Kingston
Did I Ever Tell You? emerges as a testament to resilience and love, touching on topics of grief, love and family. Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston’s mother faced a terminal cancer diagnosis when Gwen was just three years old. Despite this, her…
Love, Death & Other Scenes by Nova Weetman
After playwright Aidan Fennessy dies during the 2020 covid lockdowns, it is 15 months before his family can hold his memorial. Loss is always unfair, but it feels especially so to happen when everybody had to look after each other…
The Chain: The Relationships That Break Us, the Women Who Rebuild Us by Chimene Suleyman
In January 2017, Turkish-Cypriot London-raised author Chimene Suleyman sat in an abortion clinic in Queens, imagining her boyfriend sitting in the waiting room, ready to take her home. The closest she’d get to seeing him again was on her apartment…
Servo: Tales from the Graveyard Shift by David Goodwin
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Maybe a dead-end retail role, or a nightmare stint in hospitality? For David Goodwin, that answer is as clear as the glass on a pair of automatic doors. Fresh out of high school…
Eventually Everything Connects: Eight Essays on Uncertainty by Sarah Firth
Sarah Firth is a Melbourne cartoonist, who (among her other arts practices) produces drawings-plus-words documentation of meetings and presentations, so that participants and attendees later have a record of what was discussed, and the ideas that arose live in that…
Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir by Shoji Morimoto & Angus Turvill (trans.)
This is a memoir from someone who rents nothing and describes themselves as having ‘zero spec’ or no special qualities. In the foreword, Shoji Morimoto says he worked with a writer and an editor, and typically, despite the book materialising…
George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes
I’ll confess I wanted to review this memoir, in part, because of a prying curiosity. What might the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reveal to me about her parents, that I don’t already know? Frieda Hughes, a painter…
Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life by Amy Key
What if being single isn’t a transient state? Is a life without romantic love necessarily intolerable? These are just two of the tough, weighty questions from which Amy Key’s introspective and raw memoir unspools. Now in her mid-40s, Key hasn’t…
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder
Anna Funder’s new masterpiece, Wifedom, is the story of the invisible life of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. It is a brilliant work of counter-fiction that uses letters written by O’Shaughnessy during her marriage to Orwell, the many biographies…
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