Discover the new nonfiction books our booksellers are recommending this month!
Peaking: One Hundred and Eleven Days on Two Wheels
Saskia Beudel
I was pleased to find I share similarities with athlete (and author) Saskia Beudel. For example, we are both middle-aged women who are perplexed by our ageing selves; we enjoy a sunrise when there is no wind; and we share a dependence on caffeine. We differ, though, on recreational sport. I do none and she has completed the most demanding one-day cycling event in Australia, as a sort of ultimate experiment that encompasses over 100 days of training. Called the Peaks Challenge, it covers enormous uphill and downhill experiences across Tawonga Gap, Mt Hotham and Falls Creek in the Victorian High Country. Like Beudel, I’ve been there and can confirm that the hills are indeed peaky.
This bike riding memoir is more than a discussion about bike riding though. Beudel spends time talking us through the notion of ageing, citing various studies. (Do we ever feel our age?) She shares the joy (oh, please!) of juggling time between work, family, training, and friends. She recounts the pain of riding for hours and the pure anxiety of going into an organised sporting event where women are outnumbered four to one and therefore the foregone conclusion is that the day’s experience will be an emotional mix of exhaustion and accomplishment.
Peaking did not inspire me to shift from my electric bike to a road bike, nor do I think this is the purpose of Beudel’s story. Rather, this is a book that encourages conversations about and reflections on the notion of women ageing. Peaking is about taking up as much space as possible, trying new experiences and being amazed at how your body works. It is about freedom. Cyclists will want to read this book and use it as a training manual, other readers will find solidarity in Beudel’s beautiful writing, and women of a certain age will find that there is more than one way to wear purple as we move on through the years.
Reviewed by Chris Gordon.
Vocal Break: On Women, Music & Power
Lauren Elkin
This book contains so much. Lauren Elkin is the essayist who I feel most lucky to exist at the same time as; we get to read her books as they come out and should pay attention to their messages instantly.
Vocal Break has pieces of memoir which chronicle life as a theatre kid, coming of age surrounded by ’90s music, and feeling like a Mary Bennet: ‘… she can’t take the chitchat; she just wants to play the piano.’ This is the second nonfiction book of Elkin’s I’ve read and I’ll never tire of how she writes about her life (I feel like we are friends … I hope that we would be). Her anecdotes punctuate heavy academic research and feminist history. From Beyoncé to Hannah Arendt, it seems no woman with a voice is left out here.
Voices are the crux of the book. How musical women have been portrayed historically (see: pirate-killing sirens), how tone and accent place us within the world, and which women have been silenced again and again. Using specific ’90s acts, such as Bikini Kill and The Cranberries, to illustrate her observations on voice, Elkin delivers so many significant points that I’d advise slow and careful reading to digest it all.
The last essay in this book is a much-needed alarm bell, because while singing women can shout at the top of their voices, they cannot throw off the violent and misogynist culture around them. Almost every woman chronicled in this book has a story of violence: ‘… her voice emerges from herself, but that self is shaped by this violence.’ Elkin states that it is only with a stronger collective voice that we stand a chance.
Available from 19th May
Reviewed by Grace Gooda.
Periodic Bitch: A Memoir of Menstruation, Madness & Monsters
Emma Hardy
Every 29 days, in the week before her period, Emma Hardy becomes someone she barely recognises. She’s depressed, irritable, and unable to leave her bed. Her relationships strain under this pressure, while her grip on reality is tested. When she is diagnosed with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), she begins a long, frustrating search for relief, trying everything from an IUD (intra-uterine device) to the pill, to antidepressants. Each option offers a partial reprieve, but always at a cost.
Periodic Bitch speaks to an experience many women and people who menstruate will recognise, even if their own experience of premenstrual symptoms is not as severe. The emotional and mental strain of the more common PMS (premenstrual syndrome) is often trivialised and reduced to jokes about women ‘just PMSing’. This stereotype casts women as unpredictable, Jekyll-and-Hyde monsters who are composed most of the time but transform into something irrational or unrecognisable once a month, like a werewolf at the sight of a full moon.
Alongside her personal story, Hardy explores the cultural framework surrounding premenstrual symptoms. She suggests that expectations play a powerful role; if we are taught to anticipate irritability or anxiety, are we more likely to notice and label those feelings as a PMS or PMDD-related response? She seamlessly weaves cultural theory into her account, along with examples of how PMS is portrayed across true crime, pop culture, and feminist horror, and reflects on the history of the contraceptive pill, developed as a tool of women’s liberation, yet rooted in disturbing foundations of eugenics and racism. Nothing about these explorations is straightforward, though, and Hardy, ‘want(s) to hold multiple realities: that this illness is physical and mental and cultural, all at once.’
Importantly, this is not a self-help book but a memoir, with much of it set in the familiar territories of Melbourne’s inner north during the Covid lockdowns, giving the experiences Hardy endures an additional note of claustrophobia, confusion, and urgency. There are no neat solutions offered here, only a deep sense of the unique embodied experience of menstruation, and the navigation and persistence required to advocate for oneself in a system lacking in its understanding of this chronic condition. It’s another example of what is broadly termed ‘medical misogyny’, and a stark reminder of the many ways in which medical thinking is (again) lacking and failing individuals, and by extension everyone around that individual – all of us.
Periodic Bitch is uncompromising in its honesty about the author’s personal yet universal experience of life in a hormonal body. The book is necessarily challenging in its candour, and the author must be commended for shining a light on this often-misunderstood aspect of women’s lives with such grace, insight, and erudition.
Reviewed by Aurelia Orr.
Ghost Stories: A Memoir
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt is writing her way forward with tremendous grief caused by the death of her husband, Paul Auster. Her literary dance steps show her anguish in every line. Fans of their work will leap to this offering. Those who have gone through the recent loss of a partner may hesitate.
Hustvedt began writing Ghost Stories almost immediately after Auster’s death. I read an interview with Hustvedt in The Guardian years ago (2019) in which she said that, essentially, she works (writes) for her life. I have always been affected by this sentiment: writing for her life – that writing was her lifeline. She also mentioned in that interview that writing is full of tricks and sidesteps. And in this memoir, it’s apparent. This writing, clever and concise, is her survival technique.
Hustvedt isolates her readings about memory and cognitive processes to help her understand what is happening to her emotionally. She talks about her wedding, her daughter, her grandchild; she includes letters Paul wrote; she writes about his eyes, his hair, his hands, and his humour. She can smell him at times. She writes about their kindness to one another, their intellectual connection to each other’s work and that of others’ studies and work. She writes about loss, fear, and the future. It will break your heart.
Reading this raw and compelling story is like being a visitor in Auster and Hustvedt’s Brooklyn brownstone home. I see the chairs they read from, their bookshelves and their windows. It is an intimate portrait of a life lived together and of an active, shared, formidable intelligence. Hustvedt is not writing about loneliness or an inability to accept death, but rather that she is forsaken now that Auster is gone. Auster was her equal and so, now, grief has halved her.
May we all be so lucky in our partnerships.
Reviewed by Chris Gordon.
Women Who Win: Celebrating Courage, Conviction and Change
Antoinette Lattouf
Women Who Win is a fiercely proud and unapologetically raw insight into women’s struggles and triumphs throughout history. Full of humour, rage, and candour, award-winning Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf delves into her own stories of being unjustly sacked from the ABC for condemning the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, and the court trial that followed.
Combining personal anecdotes and insights, Lattouf explores the lives of women whose voices were also silenced in the face of injustice, who refused to submit, or who chose to strive for a life different from what was expected of them. Lattouf’s own story is inspirational: she took on Australia’s biggest broadcasting institution and questioned the freedom of speech actually permitted in the media.
In this book, we discover First Nations women who resisted colonialism, the first female Australian students to graduate from law school, and pioneers in sport, science, and climate research. Although Lattouf talks to us in an easy, conversational manner, she doesn’t hold back from delving into the intricacies within misogyny and feminism, and how the intersectionality of race, sexuality, and disability creates further complex systemic experiences of privilege or discrimination. Investigating through a cultural, social, and legal framework, spanning from colonisation in Australia to recent pop-culture moments, Lattouf highlights that although there is much to thank past female figures for (including paving the way to things we now might take for granted, e.g. the right to education and to paid work) there are still many things that have not changed. Her stories underscore the fact that although women have gained more rights in ‘the lucky country’, the ways of silencing us have just evolved over time, with Lattouf’s own forced termination from the ABC as just one example.
Women Who Win is a sharply witty and highly entertaining exploration of untold stories of women’s history.
Reviewed by Aurelia Orr.
Sirens: Inside the Shadow World of First Responders
Martin McKenzie-Murray
Sirens is an articulate and humane portrait of three first responders: Peter, a paramedic; Brett, a police officer; and Tara, a firefighter. It’s a book about how people survive such work, and why they are driven to do it in the first place. Inevitably, Sirens is also a book about trauma, and about PTSD. Well-respected journalist Martin McKenzie-Murray approaches his generous interviewees and these topics with empathy and compassion, bringing together their compelling reflections with his own observations and broader analysis.
Their experiences range from small acts of kindness in the back of an ambulance, to career redirection from Oxford to firefighting; from maintaining morale and oxygen levels among those trapped in the Beaconsfield Mine collapse, to reporting for duty at the Port Arthur massacre; from answering triple-zero calls on Black Saturday to the life-changing moment when the phone rings in the middle of the night at home.
McKenzie-Murray does not unduly glorify or valorise first responders, and he is open about his initial misconceptions about PTSD. As he finds, the worst-case scenario does not have to eventuate for events to be traumatic. He shares restrained accounts of his own experiences, and his description of how time behaves in traumatic situations is staggering in its precision. This is some of the best writing you will ever read.
Sirens is essential reading for anyone who can, but it won’t be for everyone: as the author notes clearly, many kinds of trauma are referenced in the book, including childhood sexual abuse. It feels impossible to do justice to the nuance and sensitivity of this work, and crucial to acknowledge what it must have cost McKenzie-Murray to write it, and his subjects to share their stories with him. But, as they have done before in their vocations, they felt something was important – in this instance, sharing their experiences to aid greater understanding – and so they did it anyway.
Reviewed by Elke Power.
Also noteworthy are:
Famesick: A Memoir
Lena Dunham
In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, Lena Dunham, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl, asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain. What she finds is deeper than physical relief, and more lasting, as she learns to live with what she can’t change and turns her regrets into wisdom that can carry her forward, as she reconnects to what, and who, she loves.
More stock available from 18th May
When Words Fail Us
Stan Grant
I am out of words at home. I have grown bored with my language, bored with my voice, bored with my writing. My words labour under the weight of Australia's history. The land itself, as much as I love it, bears down hard.
Now in another place, I am finding lighter words. At times, I may not need to speak at all. I smile; I nod. I seek permission to speak. Please, do you mind? Will you allow me?
In an important book for our times, Stan Grant, one of Australia's most prominent writers on identity, nationhood and belonging, reflects on how we struggle to speak to one another today, and the importance of listening, silence and philosophy – from Plato to Simone Weil to Radiohead.
The Vanishing Wild
Justine E. Hausheer
Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, yet native species are in crisis. In the last 200 years, Australia has lost more biodiversity than any other developed nation.
In this book, award-winning science writer Justine E. Hausheer encounters pygmy possums that live high in the Snowy Mountains, hears the booming calls of bitterns from their adopted home in the Riverina's rice fields, crouches after dark in the spinifex grasslands listening for the elusive night parrot and meets adorable fat-tailed dunnarts who might hold the answers to reviving the Tasmanian tiger.
The Vanishing Wild immerses us in the harsh reality of the extinction crisis and shows us the future of conservation and what can be done to save Australia's native species.
It's Not Love, Actually
Dee Salmin
Have you ever been made to feel less than just because you're single? Maybe you're tired of shrinking yourself and your needs? Or just sick of the low-effort, bar-on-the-floor dating culture?
Well, Dee Salmin definitely is ... and after years of talking to people about their love lives on triple j's award-winning podcast The Hook Up, she's ready to share everything she's learnt in this part-memoir, part-manifesto on dating, sex and love.
From being single and thriving, to dating with boundaries, to finding love that's actually worth your energy, Dee blends research, expert insight and unapologetic truth-telling in this funny, furious and totally unfiltered guide.
In a world that keeps telling women to settle, It's Not Love, Actually will empower each of us to embrace the life we deserve, and whether single or partnered up, remind us that the happiest, hottest and healthiest relationship should always be the one we have with ourselves.
For more new and engaging nonfiction, see our collection here.
