“The whole process was mysteriously painless,” Dumont recounts in her new book, The Pulling. She discovered that the hairs on her head “sit as shallowly as birthday candles on a cake” and “can be removed as effortlessly as a grape can from its stem.”

More than a decade later, Dumont has been pulling out strands and roots of hair from her scalp for so long that she invests in an expensive, custom-made hairpiece, especially designed to blend inconspicuously into the patchy hair that remains. The catalyst is the publication of her first book, No Man Is An Island (2016), an account of her time teaching English to asylum seekers on Christmas Island. Her motivation, she writes, was not “wanting to look nice” on the publicity circuit but the desire “to be able to stop thinking about my hair altogether.”

As in every other essay in Dumont’s finely wrought collection, “The Piece” stands alone, as well as in unison as memoir. The themes of shame and secrecy, evocatively rendered, pervade The Pulling. Entering the building for her first “hair transition” appointment, Dumont “felt the kind of edginess that I imagine a married man might feel visiting a brothel.” She is assigned Andrew, whose “dispassionate” approach and knowledge of her “problem” put her at relative ease. After her partner M, Andrew is “the second person on the planet to witness my scalp in this state: naked and defenceless.”

Dumont’s “problem” has had a name, “trichotillomania,” since 1987, when it was categorised in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, under the “dubious heading Impulse-Control Disorders Not Classified Elsewhere.” In DSM V, the current edition, trichotillomania has been reclassified under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders but, as Dumont notes, there is no medical consensus. Some professionals liken “the disorder to a substance addiction” while others “see it as a form of self-harm.”  Like her own attempts to “get my head around the problem,” the condition, writes Dumont, “seems to resist the medical world’s attempt to categorise it. An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing.”

In The Pulling Dumont sets herself the challenge of putting into words what can’t be captured in an official diagnosis. She begins with her family of origin, and an early onset nail-biting habit, suggesting her condition has its roots in some formative trauma, but from there she avoids the obvious route. There is life before The Pulling but not yet after: hers is not a recovery memoir. If there is a dividing line it is circa 2005, when Dumont finds a book in her university library, published in 1989, by a “Distinguished Psychiatrist” who documents cases of clients with “pointless disorders.” She recognises herself in its pages and furtively photocopies the relevant section.

As the outside knowledge accumulates and she comes to know her condition through authorities other than herself, Dumont initially feels more resistance than relief. She “felt robbed” and wanting “to reclaim my singularity, I decided that even if my condition might align to others’ conditions in its generalities, surely how it manifested in me was unique.” Dumont cycles through numerous therapists, theories and key texts and while she finds some solace, insight and direction, she also remains protective of the enduring mysteries, paradoxes and specifics of her condition.

Some of the most exquisite sentences and passages, in a book full of them, detail what it is like for Dumont inside or in the immediate wake of a “ravenous episode.” To give in is a kind of surrender, what she describes as “a turning.” Then comes the “the deepest pleasure and fullest absorption” of being “inside the experience, when the world is reduced to teeth and touch, and taste.” At the end of an episode, Dumont feels “that I’ve been shipwrecked: dazed and conspicuously fragile.”

On the flipside, Dumont speculates on the view from outside, shifting between awe and shame as the dominant registers. Perhaps, from above, it might appear that “my fingers must be moving in accordance with some greater design, like a needleworker’s, or like a spider darting from point to point to build her web.” Elsewhere, she is convinced that her behaviour “must look masochistic, deviant, repulsive.”

The beauty and power of The Pulling resides in how artfully Dumont balances two sometimes competing concerns — filling a gap and sharing a secret. Dumont makes fathomable and palpable a neglected condition estimated to affect around one in fifty people — more than bipolar or schizophrenia. Readers with trichotillomania will surely be drawn in, as will any of us who have or have had a compulsive habit dating back to childhood that began, as it did for Dumont, as “just something that I did.”

Yet Dumont is as much a writer as she is a person with trichotillomania, and accordingly The Pulling exhibits the propulsive and exacting qualities of a book that had to be written and had been brewing for a long time. Here and there, she addresses the reader directly to tell us that this is not easy, or to reflect on her own motivations. “I ought to say,” she writes, “I am finding it hard to tell you, harder than even I anticipated.” In less skilled hands, such self-reflexivity could easily grate, but Dumont succeeds in creating intimacy with her imagined reader and audience. We come to learn what it has meant for the author to carry her secret, and now to share it.

Beyond liberating herself as a writer, Dumont stakes a powerful claim for all people who have been diagnosed with a condition having the authority to tell their own stories and comprehend their own experience. As she persuasively writes, “my not-knowing that my illness existed was a precondition for coming to know it as intimately as I have.” •

The Pulling: Essays
By Adele Dumont | Scribe | $29.99 | 288 pages

The post “An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing” appeared first on Inside Story.

The ostensible hook of Arrangements in Blue, a memoir in chapters that correspond to the album’s ten songs, is that Key’s love life has not turned out as she eagerly anticipated when she was fourteen. Now in her forties, Key has not had a serious boyfriend since she was twenty-two, though not for want of yearning or trying. She lives alone with her two cats and has heard Blue so many times that she can “summon every element of the music” in her head without having to play it. The book opens with Key telling a taxi driver she’s come to Los Angeles to write a book about Joni Mitchell.

Middle-aged woman writes a book about being single and loving Joni Mitchell. Perhaps especially for readers like me who are of a similar age and circumstance to the author, and/or who share her music obsession, that summary is as enticing as it gets. Yet it only hints at the riches on offer. At least two entwined stories reflect the influence of Blue. One is the story of how the pursuit of and desire for romantic love have loomed over Key’s life, with Blue serving as a kind of aspirational benchmark. The other is about how for Key, Blue became “part of the language I had to express myself.”

What Key heard that night back in 1992 when she first encountered Blue was a woman who took herself and her art seriously. Key does similar work in Arrangements in Blue, and it has not been without struggle. She writes early on that it “scares me to lay out all the ways in which absence of romantic love touches my life.” In reckoning with the enduring desire for a relationship, and with the shame she sometimes feels about it, Key takes stock, the song cycle of Blue providing the structure that otherwise may have taken the form of more conventional life markers like marriage and children.

Mitchell and Key, poets both, are attuned to quotidian details and their larger resonance. In “My Old Man” Mitchell sings that when her lover is away “the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.” Key observes the “easy intimacy” of a couple sharing a pillow on a plane, and watches with “deep interest” the “ordinariness” of couples interacting at home. Among them are her maternal grandparents, whose ordered, tranquil domestic world provided an alternative to her parent’s unhappy marriage.

Although the rite of passage that is moving in together has not so far been part of Key’s experience, home-making and home-owning have. She captures their hard-won satisfaction and pleasure without side-stepping the difficulties or the persistent longing for a romantic love that she imagines feels like her ideal of home: “warm, intimate, symbolic in all the aesthetic details of it, and after the inevitable addictive whirr of lust, secure.”

In Mitchell’s heavily autobiographical catalogue, the song about giving up her daughter for adoption, “Little Green,” is among the most poignant. Key connects with it through recounting her abortion as a teenager and the vicissitudes of her feelings about children and parenting since. The link to Mitchell’s experience is historically contingent, with their reproductive lives defined by different options, but Key finds solace in the singer-songwriter’s words to her daughter: “sometimes there’ll be sorrow.” As a contribution to the growing canon of literature about maternal ambivalence, Key’s is distinguished from another notable work, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (which she mentions) by being less tethered to the art vs. motherhood conundrum.

Every chapter in Arrangements in Blue is revelatory in some way. In the contemporary belief in self-love as a prerequisite for any other kind of love, for instance, Key sees a “terrible burden” that can lead to debt and more self-loathing. She prefers the “less intimidating” idea of “self-friendship,” captured in the “ordinary joy of supermarket flowers around my room, rather than the unattainable perfection of a long-stemmed red rose.”

Without the validation or momentum of a partner and family, Key shapes a “life that has its own rituals, events to assign meaning to and rules to live by.” She vows to swim “in every body of water” she encounters before turning forty; and through repeated attempts comes to properly inhabit the confident persona of a solo traveller in a world where “public space is not designed for a person on their own.”

Inevitably, for a memoir written at midpoint, there is regret and grief. If in life Key is “too often held back by my own censure” when speaking of “painful feelings,” on the page she doesn’t hold back. She stands crying outside the old house in Laurel Canyon where Joni Mitchell wrote Blue, hoping no one passing by will notice. “I didn’t understand how I’d got to this point in my life.”

In writing it out, though, Key gets closer to the sources of her pain, some of them beyond her control (childhood abuse and trauma), but not all. Her “undealt-with heartache for romantic love,” she shares, “had begun to make me bitter” and negatively affect her friendships, of which there are many. Readers may think Key is too hard on herself, but there is something both deeply relatable and hopeful in how she comes to comprehend her own self-delusions.

Among the men Key has been entangled with, but with a special spot of his own, is the late Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, who died in 2020 from cirrhosis of the liver. Key’s talent and her love of language saturate every page, but it seems she came to poetry as if by accident and had the good fortune to have Lumsden as her teacher and then, quickly, her close friend.

Lumsden’s words preface the book alongside Mitchell’s and his influence is at least as profound as hers, with the added messiness and intensity of an intimate friendship that did not fit the container of a conventional relationship. Even more so than Key, Lumsden sought “romantic salvation,” including with her. It was not to be (she did not feel the same way) and in his darkest hours she was “sometimes a bad friend.” Still, in the dedicated chapter Key magnificently does what she struggled to do at Lumsden’s funeral: “explain the nature of my relationship with him.”

In 1979, Joni Mitchell told Rolling Stone magazine that “there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals” on Blue. “At that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes.” Arrangements in Blue is Key’s equivalent. I predict that, like Blue, its fans will find in it both enduring companionship and new “chords of inquiry” for years to come. More than homage, Key has paid Mitchell the ultimate tribute by creating a transcendent work of art, wrought from one woman’s bountiful life. •

Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life
By Amy Key | Jonathan Cape | $36.99 | 240 pages

The post Shades of blue appeared first on Inside Story.

When Williams recorded Happy Woman Blues in 1980 for the Smithsonian Folkways label she was twenty-seven years old, the genre of “alt country” (a term she’s perennially associated with but not fond of) had yet to be coined, and her biggest album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was eighteen years off. This year, Car Wheels turned twenty-five (another of those classic album anniversaries guaranteed to make gen X people feel their mortality) and Williams turned seventy. She’s also released a new album, gone on tour, including to Australia, and published her enthralling memoir, the enticingly titled Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.

“I don’t want to be one of those sugarcoated books like you find at Walgreens,” Williams tells an interviewer as prelude to the book. No chance. As every fan knows from her songs, steeped in experience and hard-won wisdom, she’s done her time: on the road, with men who broke her heart, and in the small and big towns she eventually felt compelled to leave or return to.

One of the thrills of reading this memoir is the chance to go behind the scenes of those songs, both in terms of her process and in relation to life. Throughout, I had to stop reading and listen immediately to the song being discussed, whether it was an old favourite of mine like “Side of the Road,” from her 1988 self-titled album, or a hidden gem I’d never clicked with before, like “Crescent City” from the same album.

First though, we read about the forces that shaped her, beginning with her parents and the southern towns and families they came from. Eschewing the advice of an “older gentleman” not to write about her childhood and just “write about the music,” Williams — who is candid about the therapy she’s had — puts her early years front and centre. On both sides are ministers and poets, including her father, the award-winning poet and university professor Miller Williams. He thought the “poets were doing the same thing his father, Ernest, had been doing through his ministry — teaching something that was mostly hidden to the rest of the world.”

Williams is indebted to her lineage — “it’s easy for me to find myself in my ancestry” — and this includes frankly addressing its darker aspects. Among the most bracing secrets she shares are about her mother, Lucille Fern Day, who “went by Lucy” and grew up in abject poverty in an abusive family headed by her “hell-fire and brimstone” Methodist minister father. Williams offers a loving, complex and open-ended portrait: Lucy played piano and read voraciously, and Williams’s happy memories of her include laughing at “all sorts of things.”

Like Sylvia Plath, though, Lucy would “drift in and out” of mental illness and was hospitalised numerous times. It was only decades later that Williams learned from her father and sister Karyn more details about the “horrifying ways” her mother was molested by men in her family, revelations she is “still trying to process.”

Perhaps inevitably, her parents’ marriage eventually collapsed under this and various other pressures, including constant changes of location while her father pursued his academic career. At eleven, her family moved to Santiago, Chile. From fourteen to sixteen, Lucinda happily lived in New Orleans, where she saw Jimi Hendrix live and was later expelled from school for protesting at racial injustice by refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In 1970, aged seventeen, she played her first live shows with family friend and folk musician Clark Jones (the first of a series of “guardian angel” figures in her musical life) while living in Mexico City. In all, she moved house twelve times before she turned eighteen.

Given the perpetual movement, Williams has “always been comfortable on the road, to keep my career going. It’s in my blood.” The “special bond” she shared with her father also endured right up until his death in 2015, and it was him she chose to live with when her parents split up. The bond was tested when she was twelve, when her thirty-five-year-old father moved his undergraduate student Jordan — Williams’s “future stepmother” — into the family home as a babysitter while her parents were ostensibly still together. Williams dates her obsessive-compulsive disorder to this development, but overwhelmingly her portrait of Miller is imbued with gratitude and affection.

More than once, Williams wryly notes that literary types — like her dad and one of his famous party guests, Charles Bukowski — are far more hedonistic in her experience than musicians are. Still, as delicious as the literary anecdotes are, it’s when she writes about music that her memoir truly soars. When she was introduced to Bob Dylan’s new album Highway 61 Revisited at the age of twelve, “it struck me like a bolt of lightning” and set her on her life path: “Between that record and Joan Baez with her jeans and little t-shirt and bare feet and long hair, I knew this was what I wanted to be.”

When she moved to New York City in 1979, after the release of her first album, a mutual friend introduced her to Dylan after one of her gigs. The “kinetic energy,” she writes, “was palpable.” Two decades later, “Dylan’s people” offered her an opening spot on his tour with Van Morrison, but — Bob being Bob — they didn’t speak during the whole tour.

For Williams, there is no higher compliment than to be compared to Dylan or Neil Young, artists who “could pretty much do whatever they wanted,” an opportunity she knows “not many women are given.” But while her songwriting is now widely recognised as comparable to theirs and other greats’, Williams’s road to fame was full of detours, setbacks and obstacles. These include dodgy record deals, shelved recording sessions and a music industry that didn’t quite know whether to classify her and her music as country or as rock (she prefers to align herself with “the blues”).

And, of course, there’s sexism in there as well, evident in how her attention to detail and determination to get it right — captured most vividly in the re-recording of Car Wheels after she was left unsatisfied by the first version — have seen her labelled as an “obsessive perfectionist.” As music writer Holly George-Warren has pointed out, this characterisation as “difficult” is not doled out to male artists like Bruce Springsteen or John Fogerty, who have also taken a long time to make records.

When Williams’s breakthrough self-titled album came out in 1988, she was thirty-five years old and had “basically been playing music every day since I was twelve, hustling day jobs to make ends meet.” As she writes, “I’m a complete anomaly in the music world, a late bloomer.” By her account, it took some time to communicate “what I felt and heard in my head,” but she never stopped moving or honing her craft as she immersed herself in one music scene after another.

Along the way there were also “stupid flirtations with various men,” as well as more substantial love affairs and connections. As she confesses, the type of man she was attracted to — prior to settling down with her current husband, her manager Tom Overby, whom she married on stage in 2009 — is best described as a “poet on a motorcycle.” Among them is the singer Ryan Adams (he inspired the song “Those Three Days” on her 2003 album World Without Tears), for whom she has maintained affection despite sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Lucinda Williams, if it isn’t clear by now, has lived a rich, exciting and challenging life and Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You emerges from her determination to reckon with it in all its shades and seasons. With themes and insights that should resonate with readers beyond her substantial and devoted fanbase, it makes for riveting reading. As with her songs, her prose is both economical and poetic, and radiates with truth and authenticity. Over the past decade or so, there has been a boom in memoirs and autobiographical writing by women in music, and hers enters the field — like her album Happy Woman Blues — as an instant classic. •

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You
By Lucinda Williams | Simon & Schuster | $39.99 | 400 pages

The post Late bloomer appeared first on Inside Story.

Together, the cover and the title promise the tango between the past and the present that Delgarno elaborates early on. By the time Australia federated in 1901, he writes, the new nation already had a type of self-righteous “prudishness baked into its bricks.” Ex-convicts, gold-diggers and settlers, most of them men, could be tried and hung for having sex with each other — that is, for “unnatural crimes.” And while moral panics and censorship are hardly unique to Australia, this country often cracked down longer and harder when it came to books once considered unacceptably risqué, like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).

To gauge whether Australia is “still a prudish nation at heart,” Dalgarno diligently consults historians and the history books, but mostly the history he captures is very recent — from the marriage equality survey in 2017, with its 61.6 per cent majority Yes vote, through to the not-quite-over Covid pandemic, which saw a sharp rise in people contacting mediation service Relationships Australia for guidance as extended lockdowns dragged on. Pertinent in another way is the 2021 census, in “which questions on sexuality and gender were notably absent.”

As useful as these signposts are for sketching out the terrain, Dalgarno is not bound by them or by sociological commitments to explaining contemporary Australian sexual behaviours and attitudes across the board.

The histories Dalgarno unfurls are more intimate and specific, including his own. Rather than narrate from the perspective of so-called prudes, Dalgarno, a novelist and journalist, interviews fellow writers and thinkers who, like himself, have lived their lives outside the assumed norms and binaries of sexuality and gender in one way or another.

These range from well-known public figures, like bestselling author Christos Tsiolkas and academic and gay rights activist Dennis Altman, to writers and creatives who have made a more recent splash, such as Roz Bellamy, editor-in-chief of Archer, a magazine devoted to gender, sexuality and identity, and novelists Peter Polites, Holden Sheppard and Filip Vukašin, all of whom write on queer themes, in very different ways.

Dalgarno also talks to people whose stories have piqued his interest, like Ruth Dawkins who is married to Young Dawkins, thirty-five years her senior, and Gabrielle Ryan, who in 2018 “came out” as asexual in Archer magazine. Ryan also “outed” her partner as a “cis-het man,” terminology that was then unfamiliar to him.

For readers who may benefit, Dalgarno includes a glossary of terms, though as his interview subjects often convey, categories like “non-binary” and “poly” can be less useful personally, and are rarely claimed unequivocally or overnight. So, while Mununjali Yugambeh poet and author Ellen van Neerven may now identify as non-binary, they also stress that the gender binary itself is a product of colonisation and that they don’t necessarily “fit any sort of label.” And after spending time in poly communities and finding them friendly enough but also consumed with the “technical aspect of labelling and defining things,” writer and critic Jinghua Qian tends to “not introduce myself as nonmonogamous or poly anymore.”

As for the awkward acronym LGBTQIA+, Dalgarno canvasses a range of views, from those who use it easily as part of their everyday vocabulary, to critics like novelist Andrea Goldsmith. “The heterosexuals are all in one group by themselves,” says Goldsmith, “and all the non-hets are smooshed together. Seems to rather privilege the heterosexuals.” Along with Altman, she prefers “queer” as a less prescriptive alternative.

Prudish Nation also features trailblazing figures who should be better known. Among them is Julie Peters, who led the way for trans-inclusive policies at the ABC, where she’d been working since 1971, when she transitioned in 1990. In the first six months, she received a “huge amount of negative pressure from many of the males” at work, she says, but she also found it “gratifying” that her female co-workers would “tell them off for abusing me.”

This is important and fascinating trans history, as is that offered by Arlie Alizzi, a Yugambeh writer, editor and curator who started to identify as trans a decade or so ago. Alizzi pays tribute to Indigenous Brotherboys and Sistergirls, the latter first gathering at a national conference in 1999 when he was still at school. If he’d known about them, says Alizzi, he thinks he would have been “less arrogant” in his twenties, because “we’re not inventing this stuff for the first time.”

Melbourne-based Dalgarno is an engaging narrator, with obvious gifts for establishing rapport and capturing a nuanced sense of a person and their circumstances. It helps that some of the people he talks to, like writer Rochelle Siemienowicz, are friends, but Dalgarno also has some personal understanding of how sexual and gender minorities are often reduced to caricatures or identity categories even in the most well-intentioned commentary.

When his novel Poly was published in 2020, Dalgarno chose to be open about his own relationships (at the time, he was married to Jess, with whom he shares two children, while also committed to his current partner Kate) and perhaps inevitably found himself “positioned as a spokesperson for polyamory.” Meanwhile, numerous polyamorous people criticised his characters for “doing it ‘wrong.’” In Prudish Nation, Dalgarno shares details about his own life on his own terms, while eschewing any grand claims to authority. His approach is questioning (is poly a sexual orientation or queer?) and communal.

For a book on the short side, Prudish Nation covers a lot of ground, taking in enduring biphobia, sex work and parenting. Some chapters hang together better than others, but the conversations are so consistently interesting it doesn’t really matter. Similarly, the purported thread of Australia’s “prude” status slips in and out of focus, with no real conclusions reached, but again the insights that do emerge are well worth reading.

On that front, people who migrated to Australia as adults — like Lee Kofman, who came from Russia and Israel, and Scottish-born Dalgarno himself — provide fresh angles. And so does poet Omar Sakr, who makes cross-cultural comparisons as a queer, Arab Muslim man who grew up in Australia where he found himself “watching in real time as the boys of my generation slowly lost all of what I saw evident in Arab men.” What Sakr calls the “straitjacket of Australian masculinity” is picked up too by several others, and is one of a number of themes that would have been worthy of more attention.

Still, Dalgarno never promised an exhaustive analysis, and on its own terms (writer talks to other writers about “life, love and libido”) Prudish Nation offers a refreshing antidote to the sensationalist, scare-mongering and often ideologically driven representations of queer lives and relationships that amped up during the marriage equality campaign.

Rolling culture wars around gender and sexuality continue to generate pain and trauma, as Dalgarno and his informants acutely recognise. Yet what Dalgarno captures in talking to people with “unconventional identities” or in relatively “unconventional relationships” is a vivid and convincing portrait of a diverse and adaptable society where things are — if only incrementally, and with setbacks — “changing for the better”. •

Prudish Nation: Life, Love and Libido
By Paul Dalgarno | Upswell | $29.99 | 200 pages

The post Baked into our bricks appeared first on Inside Story.

Ahmed, one of the world’s leading feminist and queer theorists, can rightly claim considerable credit for building solidarity around her ongoing celebration of the figure of the feminist killjoy. After the killjoy’s first appearance in her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed has since launched a feminist killjoy blog, curated a Killjoy Survival Kit and issued a Killjoy Manifesto. The last two appeared in Living a Feminist Life (2017), which Ahmed intended as a crossover book designed to generate “feminist theory out of the ordinary experience of being a feminist.”

Certainly, Living a Feminist Life brought Ahmed new fans — it’s an ideal introduction to feminist thought, and crucially to feminist feeling. Both clever and generous, Ahmed has a talent for bringing her readers with her, without ever dumbing down or sugar-coating her politics, love of theory, or lived experience as a queer woman of colour who works (or worked) in the academy. She also often circles back to her earlier work, and key themes and preoccupations, modelling how her thinking has evolved, including in tandem with her audience and through new and enduring sources of feminist inspiration.

Along the way, as Ahmed shares, the figure of the feminist killjoy has “created a feedback loop.” Readers have been inspired to write letters and songs, to form dedicated book clubs and to proudly proclaim the identity for themselves. Now, in Ahmed’s tenth book, she expands the possibilities even further, dedicating chapters to the feminist killjoy as cultural critic, philosopher, poet and activist. “Killjoy truths, killjoy maxims, killjoy equations, and killjoy commitments,” along with a reading list and questions for discussion, are collected in a dedicated handbook.

Ever attentive to the “uses” of things, particularly when repurposed for “queer” ends — see her 2019 book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use for further exposition — Ahmed distinguishes her handbook from the conventional sort. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, she writes, “does not give you a set of instructions, information or guidance on how to become a feminist killjoy. Rather, it shows how being a feminist killjoy gives you a set of instructions, information and guidance about living in this world.”

This kind of distinction is classic Ahmed, in both style and politics. She enjoys playing with genre, with words and with sentences, but there’s always a point to it. She reminds us that she is one among many feminist killjoys, rather than the anointed authority.

Ahmed’s assumed reader, then, is already a feminist killjoy. For them — or us, for I count myself as one — the handbook is offered as a “resource,” a “helping hand” and a collection of stories about being a killjoy, both Ahmed’s own and those shared with her. These include some of the stories gathered for her 2021 book Complaint!, written in the wake of her resignation from her prestigious academic post because of ongoing institutional failure to address sexual harassment. Ahmed reveals in the chapter featuring feminist survival tips that she also resigned because “I couldn’t do it anymore, fighting so hard not to get very far.” Feminist killjoys must pick their battles, and Ahmed’s decision in that case to “leak” and to “let loose” made it easier for others with stories to find her.

All feminists are killjoys in the sense that “to identify yourself as a feminist is to be judged as a killjoy.” But the feminists Ahmed brings to the front, her killjoy pantheon, are those who are the antithesis of “paper feminists,” a wonderfully succinct term to describe those who pay lip service to feminist politics while clinging to institutional power. As she has consistently done, Ahmed recovers, honours and extends a “Black and brown feminist killjoy lineage,” ranging from hugely influential American figures like bell hooks (to whom the book is partly dedicated), Angela Davis and Audre Lorde through to the Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, author of the 1977 novel Our Sister Killjoy, and from Australia, Aboriginal writers and professors Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Chelsea Watego, among others.

Ahmed has lived in Britain for some time now, which ensures that the distinctive history of Black British feminism is attentively addressed. She was raised in Australia, though, and this is reflected in her increasing engagement with the powerful work of First Nations women.

Occasionally Ahmed’s predilection for pithy maxims and truths, alongside her explicit method of revisiting her earlier work, tested the patience of this long-time reader and fan. Still, there is no doubting her abiding commitment to what she calls feminist killjoy “world-building.” She is clearly in for the long haul and knows what the stakes are.

Some of this book’s most potent moments come when Ahmed addresses the challenges of the present, including rising transphobia, some of it in the name of feminism. Here her critical eye extends beyond trans-exclusionary feminists to modes of philosophical inquiry. Drawing on the work of trans-feminist philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher, Ahmed questions philosophers who ponder race, gender and trans issues as though debating the existence of tables.

Ahmed’s special talent, though, is for elucidating first principles such as this one: “So much activist work is the work of exposure.” Or: “When you are questioned about your right to occupy a space, you are being questioned about your right to occupy a category.” In an era where accusations that “woke” culture has gone too far vastly exceed actual “cancellations,” Sara Ahmed’s ongoing project of platforming and protecting the feminist killjoy remains vital and refreshing. •

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
By Sara Ahmed | Allen Lane | $39.99 | 336 pages

The post Letting loose appeared first on Inside Story.

In a bumbling fashion, polyamory has since entered the mainstream — sort of. Television series such as the British comedy-drama Trigonometry and the North American sitcom You Me Her have updated earlier stereotypes about poly hippies by focusing on hot young triads, while on dating sites the pursuit of “ethical non-monogamy” (of which polyamory is one form) is closing in on “long-term relationships” and “friends with benefits.” The fight for legal recognition for polyamorous relationships is building wherever there’s a vanguard to lead it.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this increased visibility, however, polyamory still attracts a pronounced degree of suspicion, mockery and contempt, as two new and very different books show. Neither is dedicated to polyamory exclusively; they’re not guidebooks, for which there is a growing market, nor written from the perspective of professional expertise, like Jessica Fern’s recently published Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy (2020). What makes them especially valuable is how they think with and through polyamory, at a time when the phenomenon is overdue for wide-ranging contemplation.

Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning by Canadian philosopher and writer Carrie Jenkins is a compact work of pop philosophy, broadly adjacent to Alain de Botton’s oeuvre in aspiration (bringing philosophy to the masses) though not in tone (Jenkins is more earnest). People Who Lunch: Essays on Work, Leisure and Loose Living is a sharply observed collection in which Melbourne-based writer Sally Olds boldly sets her own work apart from at-a-glance similar books by millennial women essayists like US-based writers Jia Tolentino and Durga Chew-Bose, and not only because she’s Australian. In “The Beautiful Piece,” for instance, Olds cleverly deconstructs the contemporary “irreproachable” essay with its in-built defences, then deftly sidesteps falling into her own trap by panning out to provide a material analysis of the whole content-click-bait industry. What the two books share is that both authors have personal experience with polyamory — Jenkins is dedicated to it, while Olds recounts her fledgling efforts with bittersweet ambivalence — which they each harness to their larger concerns.

In Sad Love Jenkins ambitiously proposes a “new philosophy of love,” building on her 2017 book What Love Is: And What It Could Be and its challenge to the widespread notions that monogamy is the paradigmatic and superior expression of romantic love. In both books Jenkins presents her own experience of polyamorous relationships as the starting point for philosophical inquiry. What Love Is began with confused reactions to the fact Jenkins had both a husband and a boyfriend, prompting her opening philosophical question: “What is this thing that I’m doing? Is it love? Is it romantic love?” With cautious optimism she concluded that romantic love could accommodate non-monogamous love, and the more positive representation and discussion of polyamory the better.

Sad Love finds Jenkins in a more sombre mood. In sharing details of her own relationships in publicity for What Is Love, Jenkins, a self-described introvert, found herself uncomfortably in the spotlight as the polyamorous professor. Photographed with both her husband and then partner for a feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education (hardly the Daily Mail), Jenkins was trolled and shamed whenever her story was recycled for the media. In contemplating the “stream of nasty feedback,” Jenkins writes: “I am a woman who talks publicly about being polyamorous, so I have been called all of the derogatory words you can think of for a promiscuous woman.”

The pandemic and the election of Donald Trump compounded her despair, but rather than retreat into silence, Jenkins continues to theorise love in Sad Love, this time by pricking the “beautiful happy fantasy” of romantic love. Against the innately conservative “emotional dream” that only love can make us happy, Jenkins proposes her capacious theory of “eudaimonic love” that “has room for the full gamut of human experiences and emotions, positive and negative, happy and sad.”

Reclaiming Aristotle’s eudaimonia from English translations that conflate it with “happiness,” Jenkins develops her overarching theory first by indicting the enabling forces of the ideology of romance. These include the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness, along with capitalism and popular culture, to name the obvious ones. In true pop philosophy style, she draws on an eclectic range of thinkers and approaches, from canonical philosophers through to the “economist of love,” Marina Adshade, which makes for equal parts compelling and frustrating reading. Promising lines of argument, like her suggestion that society has only just begun to “scratch the surface” of the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” are mostly left dangling rather than properly pursued. bell hooks, arguably the key feminist theorist of love, is namechecked but only superficially engaged with.

Jenkins is both unapologetic and hesitant about philosophising from life experience. Late in the book she shares the “disheartening” story of presenting her research to a small group who predictably and intrusively wanted to discuss her personal life during question time and make moral judgements about polyamory. In bracketing Sad Love with generative claims for polyamory as a gateway to theorising love, and with examples of resistance and backlash, Jenkins captures a cultural moment but doesn’t quite escape it. Her book’s most powerful points come when she is most open about the toll of being an otherwise “respectable” public figure associated with polyamory. Elsewhere, there’s a sense that she is holding back from further examination of why non-monogamy remains so threatening.

In one of the two essays in People Who Lunch that focus on polyamory (out of a total of six), Sally Olds identifies “four main negative responses” to it “from monogamous-leaning people”: ridicule and hilarity, objective interest, suspicion and hostility, and absolute outrage. Jenkins has first-hand knowledge of each, but it is Olds who really takes polyamory as a theme and runs with it. Eschewing any claims for universalism — which theorising a philosophy of love surely is — Olds writes from a refreshingly explicit left-wing and queer perspective, rooted in her vibrant social milieu of fellow precariously employed young creatives, and in deep and wide reading.

Where Jenkins appears convinced of the inherent radicalism of non-monogamy, including as an antidote to the alienation of capitalism, Olds is not so sure. In “A Manifesto for Post-Work Polyamory” she raises the stakes of both projects by astutely identifying shortcomings on each front. In defensive mode against haters on all sides, “polyamory often tries to banalify itself” (Jenkins is somewhat of a case in point), and “must not legitimise itself at the expense of a radical politics.”

In the meantime, post-work politics — “a cluster of tactics for ending humankind’s dependence on waged labour for survival” — “must not radicalise itself by re-domesticating relationships.” Olds knows where and how radical politics have failed in the past. She’s also alert to the complacencies and dead-ends of the present, evident in the “gentrification” of polyamory, and the mangled use of the concept “emotional labour” at the expense of class-based solidarity. The manifesto is an audacious genre, and Olds confidently updates and reinvigorates it.

Olds packs more thought-provoking analysis into the next essay, “For Discussion and Resolution,” than is found in most book-length treatments of the subject. For readers with only a passing knowledge of polyamory, she skilfully joins the dots between enduringly stereotypical “geek” polyamorists like Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, various experiments in living and loving (including an “Eveless Eden” all-male commune in Queensland in the 1890s) and key texts of polyamory’s more recent bourgeois bohemian turn (most notably, The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, published in 1997 and never out of print since).

That her survey also includes Native American scholar and “critical polyamorist” Kim TallBear and alternatives to both polyamory and monogamy, such as “dyke ethics,” further sets it a cut above other think pieces on the subject.

Another through line is Olds’s own increasing exposure to “poly people,” which began during her undergraduate days in Queensland, then morphed into first-hand experience when she and her then boyfriend J decided to try “hierarchical poly” and remain each other’s primary partners. Against the plethora of evangelical and doom-and-gloom first-hand accounts in circulation, Olds offers an insider view that throws up larger questions. “I am newly terrified,” she recounts in the present tense, “by the threat of sexual stagnation.” Polyamory, she continues, “makes obvious the sexual entitlement generally unremarked in monogamous sexual relationships.”

In contrast to Jenkins, who maintains a utopian view of non-monogamy, Olds does not let monogamy or polyamory off the hook. Each is presented as equally bound up in the logics of capitalism, individualism, sexism, settler colonialism and self-and-collective delusion. Polyamory, suggests Olds, has or can have more radical potential, but if it keeps going as it has it will be revealed as a “stop-gap solution,” extending privilege rather than dismantling it. By blending her personal experience of polyamory with its broader history, Olds ponders to riveting effect the tensions between polyamory’s utopian history and claims and its contemporary manifestations. •

Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning
By Carrie Jenkins | Polity | $30.95 | 200 pages

People Who Lunch: Essays on Work, Leisure and Loose Living
By Sally Olds | Upswell | $29.99 | 144 pages

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So far, all three volumes have been published in November, just in time for the annual slowdown. Last summer and the one before, my friend L and I spent hours discussing Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020) on our way to and from the beach, on the sand, in the water. We have been reading Garner our whole adult lives and are now in our forties. In volumes I and II, we encounter her at a similar life stage, and it’s thrilling.

Another friend half-jokes when the occasion arises that “We’re all Helen Garner now.” In other words, some of us find ourselves relating to the exasperated Garner who wrote The First Stone (1995), her first major work of non-fiction, and a book so divisive and controversial it spawned a dedicated genre of responses. Among my cohort, several were so outraged by what they saw as her dismissive, knee-jerk account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College that they never read Garner again.

For those of us who kept going, the publication of the diaries, edited by Garner, are the ultimate reward. Some critics may have dismissed Garner’s debut novel Monkey Grip (1977) on the basis that it read as though she’d plundered her diaries, but its immediate and ongoing success suggests that for many readers that was, and is, at the very least, part of the appeal. The fiction that followed — the conjoined novellas Honour and Other People’s Children (1980), the much-lauded The Children’s Bach (1984), the short story collection Postcards from Surfers (1985) and Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), her last novel until The Spare Room (2008) — saw Garner continue to focus on relationships, families and household dynamics. These books were all drawn from life, but as time went on there was less handwringing about whether they qualified as fiction or not — a wider development, spurred along, in this country at least, by Garner’s influence.

Garner’s switch to non-fiction deservedly attracted many new readers, but there have always been diehards who proclaim their preference for her fiction, me included. Reading the diaries, however, the distinctions evaporate. She’s been writing them all along, no matter what else she happens to be working on or towards, and they’re full of the best bits of her fiction and non-fiction.

When I’ve pined for more fiction, what I really wanted was more of what Garner writes about in her novels: the peculiar tango of heterosexual relationships, variously configured families, friendships taken as seriously as other intimacies, children with distinct personalities and concerns of their own, the whole glorious mess of domestic worlds, and how it feels to be a woman. The diaries overflow with all of these, while also charting Garner’s evolution as a writer. Across all three volumes, she grapples with self-doubt while simultaneously cultivating her own patch, described in the latest volume as “the territory that I have opened up and marked out and developed — the crossover between fiction and an account of what happened?”

This third volume, How to End a Story, is as propulsive as the most addictive page-turner and as exquisitely rendered as her novels and short stories. Covering the years 1995 to 1998, it opens in the fresh wake of the publication of The First Stone, but surprisingly — and refreshingly — the whole saga is mostly confined to a few extended entries and some passing mentions. (My friend Y texts: “I reckon HG pruned The First Stone bits right back, leaving only the thorns.”)

Whatever she’s left in or out, Garner’s diaries are expertly paced and arranged, as much outward-looking as inward, and as attuned to the quotidian as to the profound — as in life, there’s no separation here, just perpetual motion, even when feeling stuck and solitary, which Garner was for a fair chunk of the years recorded here.

To open at a random page: Garner’s new computer gives her trouble and she “sobbed and paced up and down, clutching my temples like someone in a Chekhov play.” In an art shop, she lets out a “snort of laughter” when she hears a girl say to her friend, “Life’s too short to spend it with a wanker.” With her husband V off to dinner with her rival X and their art-critic friend, Garner makes herself “a pasta with a powerful sauce of garlic, chilli, parsley, tomato and anchovies” and talks houses and future babies with her recently married daughter M on the phone.

The dissolution of Garner’s marriage to V — otherwise known as the novelist Murray Bail, to whom she was married for some eight years — provides a deeply compelling narrative arc, and together with the Sydney location marks out the third volume as the most self-contained. What’s at stake comes early: “I think I am in the classic position of a woman artist who in order to maintain a marriage is obliged to trim herself so as not to make her husband feel — what? Something a man is not supposed to have to feel?” As the marriage spirals, the details are captured and dissected in her diary and in psychoanalysis, both of which V mocks with the lofty disdain of a man given to pronouncing, for example, that women’s writing “lacks an overarching philosophy.”

Knowing I have a review brewing, a friend gets in touch to share their thoughts about V. “Can he really have been as much of an [expletive] as he seems? And can she really have put up with him for more than a minute?” The diaries (V is also a major figure in the second volume) reveal plenty about what drew and kept them together, not least writing, but that too was a fault line. In V’s recoiling from “the thought that I wrote about him in my diary,” Garner identifies a “head-on smash between my lifelong habit of recording and analysing my private life, my need and right to do this — and his revulsion against being recorded in his private life: both tenable positions, which cannot be reconciled.”

Briefly, Garner resolves to “not write about V except in passing,” but it proves impossible. There’s a lot more to write about — her family back in Melbourne, trips overseas, her dreams, the breakthroughs at therapy, what she’s reading and writing, the chorus of friends, music, sewing, cooking, the news of the day, Proust on jealousy, people on the street — but the breakdown of the marriage hovers over all of it. In Buenos Aires, on her way to a magazine assignment in Antarctica, she writes that “I might have loved being here” but “the amount and quality of pain I’m in is sort of unbelievable.”

In one of the most remarkable entries, in the thick of torment, Garner envisions a new life for herself, “back in Melbourne without V,” “an imaginary future” on her own terms which now reads as identical to the life she appears to be living in the present day. My friend J takes a screenshot and posts the passage on Instagram: “Sometimes we know what we want even when we think we want something else.” Another friend declares, “I think these diaries are the best thing she’s ever written.” I agree; they are her life’s work, and the ideal mode for a “writer who works off and is nourished by the events of daily life.” •

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Writing The Second Sex (1949), one of the most influential feminist texts of the twentieth century, would have been enough to ensure her place in history, but Beauvoir was also a prize-winning novelist, a superb memoirist and a brilliant philosopher (though she stopped short of calling herself one). The life she led — almost satirically French bohemian, for better and for worse — has inspired a plethora of biographies and trips to Paris. And, since her death in 1986, interest in her life and work has eclipsed the attention received by her long-time partner, philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre.

Evidence of Beauvoir’s influence is everywhere, including in the life-writing of Deborah Levy, who provides the sparkling introduction to the English edition of The Inseparables, and in Lauren Elkin’s skilful translation and illuminating translator’s note. They provide enticing preludes, but it’s best to read them afterwards and instead dive right in. Beauvoir completists will already be familiar with the friendship that inspired the novella, while readers with no pre-existing knowledge will lose nothing if they catch up on the real-life details afterwards.

For the purposes of this review, some basics will suffice. Beauvoir and Elisabeth Lacoin, affectionately known as Zaza, met as precocious Parisian schoolgirls. From their first encounter until Zaza’s tragically premature death in 1929 to a sudden illness, just as she was about to turn twenty-two, they shared a deeply felt but lopsided friendship, with Beauvoir the most devoted of the pair. The Inseparables is not her first or only attempt to capture this formative connection — most memorably in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) — but it is her most distilled, vivid and elegiac.

All of Beauvoir’s fiction, like her philosophy, was inspired by life, and so it is here. In this radiant novella, anticipating so-called “auto-fiction” by decades, she fuses the craft of fiction with the force of lived experience and an abiding existential commitment to freedom.

Divided into two parts, The Inseparables traces the friendship between Sylvie (Beauvoir) and Andrée (Lacoin) from their years of Catholic schooling through to their time at the Sorbonne, where Andrée chooses to study literature and Sylvie philosophy. It’s Sylvie’s perspective and world that readers are inducted into, but swiftly it is Andrée, a confident new arrival with an intense gaze and an arresting explanation for her diminutive stature (“I got burned alive”), who becomes the main story.

Or rather, it is the story of Sylvie in relation to Andrée. In meeting Andrée, Sylvie’s young life properly begins, a realisation that hits her first with force — “Life without her would be death” — then very soon after with the bittersweet sense that Andrée does not, or cannot, reciprocate in kind. For all her evident singularity, and no matter their status at school as “the inseparables,” Andrée is too deeply ensconced in her large upper-class Catholic family, and especially devoted to her formidable mother Madame Gallard.

This inaugurating imbalance is never quite overcome, but it is also part of the making of Sylvie. “No, our friendship was not as important to Andrée as it was to me, but I admired her too much to suffer from it.”

Sylvie grows into her resolution, but with her desire to know and be known by Andrée, some suffering is inevitable. At midpoint in the novella and in their friendship, Sylvie is stricken to hear Andrée declare that a summer boyfriend “was the only person in the world who loved me exactly as I was, and because I was myself.” “What about me?” she asks. Emboldened by alcohol, Sylvie declares her devotion, “the kinds of things you say only in books.”

Through Andrée’s bemused reaction we learn more about Sylvie, as well as the mysteries that sit at the heart of intimate human relationships. And yes, there’s an erotic undertow, but it remains inchoate. Sylvie is not so much jealous of Andrée’s “non-platonic kisses” with others as struck by what they give Andrée access to. “Well informed” about sex, Sylvie professes that her body “had dreamed its dreams,” but there was a “passageway between the heart and the body that remained a mystery” to her.

Sylvie’s maturity is marked in other ways. She comes to understand her family’s downward mobility as a kind of liberation — “I was obliged to go out and work; the problems that tormented Andrée didn’t concern me.” Early on, Sylvie abandons God, though it’s her continuing respect for “Christian morality” that draws her to her first university friend, the brilliant Pascal Blondel (based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who would go on to become the leading philosopher of phenomenology). Blondel is affectionately depicted by Beauvoir as a serious-minded, but intensely loving and lovable young man, and when Andrée and Pascal fall in love, Sylvie is “not jealous” and instead marvels at how her friends ripen into better versions of themselves.

The joys and tragedies of the second half of The Inseparables orbit around the love affair of Andrée and Pascal, but while the plot resembles melodrama, its execution is an exquisite meditation on the costs of societal constraints on human freedom — especially that of young women. That Andrée was raised to make a good marriage on her family’s terms is presented as her doom, but there is deep loss for Sylvie too. When she sees Andrée cry for the first time, Sylvie wants “to take her hand, make some gesture, but I was imprisoned by our strict upbringing and I didn’t make a move.”

Apparently not published in her lifetime because Beauvoir felt the book too “intimate,” The Inseparables is far more than an abandoned curiosity. The novella firmly belongs in the precious canon of fiction about female friendship, most recently perfected by Elena Ferrante. Above all, in The Inseparables Beauvoir honours her first impressions of her first true love: “Secretly I thought to myself that Andrée was one of those prodigies about whom, later on, books would be written.” •

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With her starkly posed question, Srinivasan pushed the conversation beyond the disturbing subculture of incels to consider more broadly the politics of sex and desire. Can and should sexual preferences be subject to political scrutiny? And what of the sexual desires of people outside the bounds of mainstream sexual appeal? These are tricky questions but Srinivasan, cognisant of the high stakes, navigated them carefully and thoughtfully.

Srinivasan’s LRB essay fittingly takes centre stage in her debut essay collection The Right to Sex, augmented by a fascinating “coda” tracing responses to Srinivasan’s essay and her own evolving thinking about the “politics of desire.” Notably, the title is no longer posed as a question, though as befitting the essay mode and philosophical inquiry, the collection is replete with them.

Srinivasan writes in her preface that her essays “dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence,” and are not intended “to convince or persuade anyone of anything, though I would not be unhappy if they did.” As explicitly feminist essays, Srinivasan positions them in the tradition of feminist theory spun from the reality of lived experience and shared struggle, rather than “from on high.” It’s a rousing and enticing lead-in, with an urgent tone. Re-read afterwards, however, the preface also signposts the competing tensions evident throughout, including between an avowed grassroots feminism and an interlocuter who is based at Oxford University.

The American edition of The Right to Sex — not the one I read — has a subtitle: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. It’s apt insofar as Srinivasan canvasses the current hot topics associated with feminism, or demanding of a feminist response, most of them to do with sex: #MeToo, consent, pornography, sex work, and more tangentially, trans rights.

On most of these topics, Srinivasan’s intervention is as stimulating and welcome as any. In the opening essay, “The Conspiracy against Men,” Srinivasan shifts focus away from the high-profile figures ensnared by #MeToo to those most likely to be accused and/or imprisoned for rape: black and brown men. The #MeToo mantra “Believe women” is similarly challenged for eliding historical and enduring racialised sexual stigma. As for those who defend men on the basis that until #MeToo came along they had no idea what other men were doing, she persuasively dismisses them as “in denial of what men have seen and heard.”

The problems of carceral responses to sexual violence, and of “carceral feminism,” are picked up again in the closing essay “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism.” Here, Srinivasan is at her most passionate, arguing for an anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminism (and a feminist working-class movement) of which there are both historical and current exemplars.

Yet while she points to “theorists and practitioners of feminist abolitionism” for inspiration, Srinivasan curiously devotes more space to feminists who have campaigned for the abolition of sex work rather than the abolition of the carceral state. This is in keeping with the heterodox historical approach that characterises Srinivasan’s creatively researched and synthesised essays. The historical turn in contemporary feminist writing is to be welcomed — like recent books by Katherine Angel and Lorna Bracewell, to name just two, Srinivasan generatively revisits the Anglophone feminist “sex wars” of the 1970s and 1980s — but sometimes the topic at hand begs for more engagement with contemporary activism and theorising.

Take, for instance, the essays “Talking to My Students about Porn” and “On Not Sleeping with Your Students.” In key respects, these are the strongest in the book and testimony to Srinivasan’s opening gambit that feminist theorising is most effective when extrapolated from life. Of all the essays, they are the most coherent in argument and focus, and the most engaging, if not least because Srinivasan shares more of herself in them.

In the latter, she makes a compelling case for a “sexual ethics of pedagogy,” variously drawing ideas from psychoanalysis, early feminist theorising on workplace sexual harassment, and feminist thinkers like bell hooks who have written about eros and pedagogy. As a counterpoint, the notorious case of Jane Gallop, the feminist philosopher accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s, is productively revisited. Yet we read more about one of Gallop’s male defenders opining in a literary journal than we do about the material conditions of the contemporary neoliberal university. These days, the teacher is more likely to be an exploited casual than a male god professor or feminist superstar, and increasingly teaching is mediated by screens.

I also wonder how representative her classroom is. But still, like Srinivasan, I’ve found students in my classes who are open to, and curious about, the anti-porn feminism exemplified by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, while simultaneously wary of the sorts of solutions that seemed both possible and plausible in the 1980s.

Here, Srinivasan identifies and starts to fill what she sees as a lacuna: feminist writing about pornography that resists the pull of “anti-porn” or “pro-porn” feminism. She admirably traverses a diverse range of views on both the harms and possibilities of porn, yet ultimately retreats into a vague vision of “more joyful, more equal, freer” sex that recalls Ariel Levy’s 2005 polemic Female Chauvinist Pigs. Feminist writing about sex need not seem so removed from it.

The Right to Sex is, at once, equivocal, didactic, spirited and oddly bloodless in parts — which makes for mostly rewarding but occasionally frustrating reading. For those seeking a primer or refresher on feminist debates primarily emanating from the United States and Britain, Srinivasan is an erudite and well-informed guide, adept at summarising where we are now as well as illuminating some of the paths that led to it. Now that the promise of the LRB essay is fulfilled, and Srinivasan properly launched as a public feminist and intellectual, I look forward to future writing that opens up vistas briefly glimpsed in The Right to Sex. •

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What happened next became one of the most high-profile domestic violence homicides in a year when their rising tally was grabbing national headlines. Her father stabbed her mother Salwa to death in front of Haydar’s youngest sister Ola, who was wounded when she tried to intervene. The case went to trial, first for the conviction and then for sentencing; throughout, her father’s side of the family appeared daily in public support of him.

In 2018, after the case had made its way through the criminal justice system, Haydar made her public debut as a visual artist. For the Archibald Prize, she painted herself in gloriously patterned hijab holding a framed press photograph of Salwa. In Salwa’s arms is a photograph of her mother Layla Shaikh Hussain Haidar — the artist’s beloved Teta, who was killed by Israeli drones during the war in Lebanon in 2006. Just as the beautifully layered portrait draws the viewer in, its title “Insert Headline Here” gives them something more to think about. Too easily, and too often, headlines reduce the lives — and deaths — of women like these, women in headscarves, to fit sexist, racist and Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslim women and Islam.

Haydar’s remarkable portrait, with its intricate bundling of generations, kinship and shattering loss, is hidden on the back cover of The Mother Wound, where it both contains and unleashes Haydar’s memoir. With this painting, she found a way to start sharing, as she puts it, “the parts of our stories that Dad’s family, the legal system and the media had not made room for.” Through her art, her advocacy against domestic violence and now in her writing, Haydar continues the loving and painful work of making personal and wider meaning of the deaths of her mother and grandmother, and her place in a matrilineal line wounded by trauma. Her distinct perspective — as the first-born daughter of Muslim Lebanese immigrants who grew up in southwestern Sydney in the shadow of the Cronulla riots — animates this quest and underpins the larger significance of the book.

In her own estimation, Haydar is more confident as an artist than she is as a writer, but as is sometimes the case when a person is driven to write because they must, The Mother Wound grips the reader’s attention and emotions from the first page. It opens with Haydar giving birth to her daughter, just months after her mother’s murder. When the midwife acknowledges her loss, Haydar responds: “I am so happy to have a daughter. I come from a family of strong women.”

Among them are Haydar’s two sisters, whom she depicts with love and affection without ever presuming to tell their stories for them. As the title infers, though, The Mother Wound is not a straightforward triumphalist account of multigenerational maternal strength. Instead, it unfolds resolutely on Haydar’s terms, its non-linear and sometimes repetitive form reflecting how her mother’s brutal murder rearranged everything she knew about her family and the world.

In passages likely to resonate strongly with readers whose own lives and families have been upended by violence, Haydar revisits her memories of her parent’s marriage, including her mother’s account of it. This powerful thread unfolds across the course of the book, made more acute by Haydar’s frank recollections of minimising or not properly comprehending what her mother had confided in her.

During her father’s court case, she reveals, she was still getting used to calling what her mum had gone through abuse. Like many other abusers, her father was not physically violent towards her mother — until he was, fatally. Looking back to what she’d been taught in school, she remembers a whole swathe of useful information about sexual and general health, but “not anyone asking whether we could identify abuse, or whether we had witnessed it.”

In the worst possible circumstances, Haydar began to educate herself and others, aided by public awareness campaigns like Destroy the Joint’s Counting Dead Women project. Her nascent feminism started to “crystallise,” sharpened against a wider culture which correlates Muslims with violence; a criminal justice system stacked against victims; and condemnation from members of her own extended family and community. Movingly, Haydar also discovered how politically engaged her mother was before she died, adding another layer to her nuanced tribute.

The Mother Wound is a major contribution to the discussion of domestic violence, including its impact on surviving family members. Haydar weaves in pertinent research, but what stands out are her own hard-won views and insights. She expresses some ambivalence about carceral responses to gendered violence, while firmly believing there are no excuses for men like her father. In sharing her story, she documents a wider cultural shift, an expanding public space for talking about domestic violence, and one that is crucially becoming more diverse.

Summing up The Mother Wound as an important book about domestic violence would do it a disservice, though, and not only because it potentially condemns the memoir to a worthy obligation read. The wound Haydar carries also includes her grandmother’s death in a war that seemed so distant in 2006 that she didn’t feel it entitled her to special consideration at school. Haydar and her mother both grieved deeply, but apart, separated by differences in age, personality and upbringing.

In the cruellest twist of fate, Haydar is now able to fathom her mother’s pain and public mourning, and to identify that her Teta “has been denied a language and a response. There is no movement and no hashtag for this kind of woman.” There isn’t, but there is now Haydar’s urgent and necessary book. •

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I am breaking reviewer protocol here by referring to the author by her first name because I have been a huge fan since I first saw her on television singing “Mandinka” back in the late 1980s, when I was still a girl and she was barely an adult. To millions around the world, fans or not, Sinéad O’Connor is Sinéad. As she recounts, Americans have mangled the pronunciation of her name, but she’s still Sinéad. She bears no ill will towards them (and as a teenager, she worshipped Americans), except maybe for Prince, who wrote her biggest hit single, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and doesn’t come off well in the chapter dedicated to him. Their encounter is frightening and slapstick, and while Prince is no longer around to defend himself, I believe Sinéad. In sweet revenge, she nicknames him “Fluffy Cuffs.”

As the Prince vignette hints, Sinéad is a riveting narrator: warm, funny and candid, with a refreshing libidinous streak. Now in her mid-fifties, she focuses in Rememberings mainly on her troubled childhood, rise to fame and celebrity years, with more memoirs enticingly promised. In this case, her stated desire is to “let the child inside me speak because she needed to speak.” And as she does, we are reminded how very young and vulnerable she was when she became stratospherically famous, but also how defiant and self-possessed, especially when it came to her music.

Rememberings begins by offsetting affectionate tributes to her parents, siblings and extended family with harrowing accounts of her mother’s abuse and neglect, and a profound sense of loneliness. As a girl, Sinéad felt so starved of parental love that she knocked on neighbours’ doors in her Dublin neighbourhood asking if she could be their child. For a time, Elvis Presley is her father substitute — along with God — until he dies, making way for Bob Dylan.

Sinéad’s descriptions of the music and musicians who have moved her are exquisite. Dylan’s “voice is like a blanket” and she sees from the album cover “he’s as beautiful as if God drew breath from Lebanon and it became a man.” This intense love of music she shares with her mother, whose record collection was spread across their big dining table “like a deck of cards.”

Although her mother dies just as she’s embarking on her music career, she hovers over it from the beginning. “Songs are ghosts,” Sinéad writes, and “Troy,” from her debut album The Lion and the Cobra (1987), is one of many she has written and sung for her mother. When she records the demo, she makes Chris from her record company sit outside. He comes back in “really shaken” and makes her “play it over and over.” It’s a delight to read of Sinéad’s pride in her music, in how the music affects people, and in the decisions she made along the way. These include shaving her head and getting pregnant with her first child Jake before her first album was even released. (Sinéad would go on to have three more children, each to a different father, and she devotes a loving chapter to them in which she confesses what the reader has probably already surmised: “it’s difficult to be a good mother when you’re a touring musician.”)

Sinéad’s second album, the now-classic I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (1990), almost wasn’t released, with Nigel Grainge from Ensign, her record company, declaring it “too personal; it’s like reading someone’s diaries.” Later, the Edge from U2 tells her he could only listen to her 1994 album Universal Mother once, because “it was too personal.” Again, this makes her proud: “too personal” is her key register, though not the only one, as she details in an annotated discography in the last third of the memoir.

The backlash against Sinéad began when she refused to attend the 1991 Grammy Awards, but peaked when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992 in protest against child sexual abuse — at the height of her fame, and well in advance of wider revelations of systemic abuse in the Catholic Church. I’d forgotten a third controversy: the brouhaha that erupted when she chose not to have “Star-Spangled Banner” played before a show in New Jersey. Her critics ranged from MC Hammer, who sent her a first-class ticket back to Ireland, to Frank Sinatra. During this fevered period, Sinéad still managed to have lots of fun — sexy times on the road, going undercover at a protest against her — but some of the most telling chapters speak volumes because of what is left out or only briefly mentioned.

There’s a sense of both catharsis and reclamation in how Sinéad relays these events. In the conventional telling, she capsized her career; in hers, she liberated it and herself. As she writes, “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl.” At heart and in spirit, she’s a punk and a rebel. At the peak of her fame, her kindred spirits were the Rastafarians she was hanging out with in New York’s Lower East Side and hip-hop artists like Public Enemy, whose symbol she shaved onto the side of her head for the 1989 Grammys in protest at the censorship of rap music. Her declared affinities, as an Irish woman, with Black and colonised peoples might raise more eyebrows these days, but this is her truth and she honours it.

As a narrative, Rememberings dissipates at the point Sinéad became what she calls a “pariah.” Midway through writing the book, she had a radical hysterectomy “followed by a total breakdown,” and by the time she recovered from it she was no longer able to remember much of what came before it. She has no regrets, but there have clearly been costs. Rememberings, like many of her songs, moves from whispers to screams to ecstasy and back again. And like Sinéad’s music, it eschews the notion that art can be “too personal.” She would know. •

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A formal diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder in early 2019 offered further affirmation, inspiring his second memoir, My Year of Living Vulnerably — though “memoir” doesn’t quite capture the scope and ambition of Morton’s experiment. Across the span of a year, he seeks to “rediscover love” in its myriad forms, a quest interrupted and redirected by the global pandemic.

Morton found himself sharing the stage with Atkinson when he was promoting his first memoir, One Hundred Years of Dirt, published in 2018 to wide critical and popular acclaim. That book has already, and rightfully, been canonised by some as among the great Australian memoirs. Morton, barely thirty, was social affairs reporter for the Australian, where he had established himself as a genuinely refreshing voice with a distinctive empathy for the marginalised among us.

One Hundred Years of Dirt elevated his writing, and its key themes of poverty and class, to a new level and introduced him to a wider audience. Both engagingly told and unflinching, it recalled a childhood marked by tragedy, isolation and deprivation as well as by love, resilience and good humour. It revealed several gaps publishers may not have realised existed — for books about growing up in rural Australia, about being poor and raised in a single-parent family, and about all of those things plus being gay. Over several deeply affecting chapters, Morton recounts the anguish of his early twenties, including two suicide attempts, as he struggled with his sexuality and mental health.

Given this material, it’s no surprise Morton ended up on a panel about “writing trauma.” Yet he convincingly writes that he “spent so much energy focused on everyone else’s trauma that I never noticed my own.” He skilfully describes a moment that has major explanatory power in retrospect: a bleak recollection of how, aged seven, he found himself alone on the family property with his father and his father’s mistress after his brother, the victim of a near-fatal accident, had been flown with his mother and sister to a distant hospital. Imagine, “if it helps,” he writes, that you are “seven years old. You have been direct witness to physical trauma and you spend your days and nights alone in the shadow of a ruined man.”

Morton is at his most illuminating when he shares not only how trauma has shaped him but also how he still exists in its grip. Keenly aware of the increasing saturation of “trauma” discourse, he cautions with hard-won knowledge that we “must be aware of trauma the way a zookeeper is aware of the lion: knowing that the cage is sometimes more dangerous than the thing it keeps, that it often pays to be wary of both.”

My Year of Living Vulnerably confirms Morton as one of Australia’s most endearing and versatile writers. Now a senior journalist at the Saturday Paper, he has a knack for humanising the people he speaks to, no matter who they are. At his best, he is a master of shifting registers, whether of tone or subject. Distilled, the memoir at the heart of this book is as welcome and necessary as his first.

For all of its strengths, though, My Year of Living Vulnerably is also at times a frustrating read, suggesting its need for a longer gestation. Morton is upfront about the challenges of writing a book to a deadline during the pandemic, and sometimes the difficulty shows. For every tightly focused chapter — on loneliness and masculinity, for instance — there is a rambling one, padded with philosophical ruminations, slabs of research and excerpts from other books that moved him. Numerous times, as he charges off in another direction, I found myself wishing he would sit longer with a thoughtful reflection or insight. Elsewhere, though, the digressions seem to be the point, as he strives to push the memoir beyond the usual boundaries and expectations.

There is no doubting Morton’s talent, sincerity and generosity, including towards other writers. His book sent me back to Atkinson’s brilliant Traumata, a feminist reckoning with trauma that deserved more attention and, if anything, has become more pertinent as issues of sexual and gendered violence and abuse have moved to the centre of national conversation. Like Morton, Atkinson finds in writing and reading that “a touch of salvation is possible, a loosening from the machine, some kind of rising out of it, some kind of not being lonely, the balm of world-making words.”

Lech Blaine is similarly invested in the qualified power of writing to give expression to, and some relief from, trauma and its aftermath. His impressive first book, Car Crash: A Memoir, shows that he also has other things in common with Morton: they’re both originally from regional Queensland, they’re reasonably close in age (Blaine is in his late twenties), and they now write for Schwartz Media. Each is acutely attuned to the dynamics and particulars of class — downward for Morton’s family and upward for Blaine’s, at least when counted by houses and businesses bought and sold. Fathers loom large, in Morton’s case as an absence, in Blaine’s as a strong presence. And as with Morton’s first memoir, Blaine clearly has a story he needs to tell, one he has previewed in earlier, shorter iterations.

It would be a disservice to Blaine’s unique talent to labour the comparison further, other than to wish his debut as much success as Morton’s was, for it surely deserves it. Tim Winton, probably the best Australian writer about Australian men (of a certain kind, anyway), endorses them both.

Central to Blaine’s story is an accident. When he was seventeen, he somehow survived without serious injury a car crash that killed his friends Will, Hamish and Henry, and left two others, Tim and Nick, in comas. Dom, the driver of the overloaded car, faced criminal charges and his survival is especially tainted. He appears only fleetingly, on one occasion offering the observation that “Australians are so uncomfortable talking about pain. Other cultures confront it. We just go to the pub and get smashed together.”

Blaine comes of age in this world, the youngest and only biological son of a rugby league–obsessed unionist publican and a bookish mother in a large brood of foster children. Both parents drink to excess, and for a time so does Blaine, not only because he survived a crash that quickly marked him out as someone special — for a second time, following his “miracle” birth. But he sees the life of a survivor as an anti-climax: “We feel like flakes and failures and fakes, the same as everyone else, except the stakes become much higher.”

As an anatomy of a car crash and its reverberations in an age of social media, Car Crash delivers from the first arresting page. But it is also much more than this — or rather, Blaine succeeds in making it both a much bigger and a more intimate story. He adeptly delivers a family saga, a social history and a bildungsroman set at the turn of the twenty-first century in southern Queensland. Without shying away from the psychological consequences of his experience, he is less interested in being defined by trauma, at least diagnostically, than he is in locating it in these intertwined worlds.

Occasionally, his prose strains for effect — “Sheets of corrugated steel spread like melanomas across a sunburnt horizon” — but more often his writing impresses with its evocative precision. “Trauma,” he reflects at one rock-bottom point, “was a paradoxical combination of homesickness and homelessness.” Like Morton and Atkinson, Blaine knows there is “no closure,” but he writes anyway, because he can and he must. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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In France itself, of course, the reality was more complex — as was the Le Monde letter itself, which in its less inflammatory sections raised important questions about sex and censorship and the limits of personal testimony. #MeToo is an adaptive phenomenon, moulding itself to local conditions. The French movement against sexual violence continued to grow, extending to high-profile actions against the film and music industries, and to the gay community, with #MeTooGay gathering the testimonials of gay men who had been abused. “New” feminisms emerged, sometimes dismissed along crude generational lines or as American imports. Some issues cut right through the debates, however, namely incest and child sexual abuse, prompting widespread calls for action and a cultural reckoning.

It was against this charged backdrop that Pauline Harmange’s I Hate Men and Vanessa Springora’s Consent: A Memoir were published last year in France. Indeed, Springora’s finely calibrated account of the sexual relationship she’d had when she was fourteen, some thirty-five years earlier, with the fifty-year-old French writer Gabriel Matzneff marked a tipping point. What had once been tacitly accepted now needed to be named for what it was and is, and punished accordingly. Springora was hardly Matzneff’s only victim — he groomed many teenaged girls and boys, and wrote openly about his sexual desire for them. He will be tried in September this year for promoting the sexual abuse of children.

The genesis of I Hate Men is less confronting, but also newsworthy. Harmange, a twentysomething aspiring writer, wrote a blog post flirting with the idea of misandry as a response to feminist burnout. Republished as an essay by a small press, it caught the attention of France’s gender equality minister, Ralph Zurmély. Without having read the book, Zurmély declared it a “sex-based incitement to hatred” and called for it to be banned. Not surprisingly, a mainstream publisher picked up the essay and it became a bestseller, launching Harmange’s career and provoking predictable online harassment and death threats. Zurmély, meanwhile, is no longer gender equality minister.

Both books have now been published in English, each crisply and effectively translated by Natasha Lehrer. They arrive as “French literary sensations,” but beyond a shared historical moment and cultural context, and beyond sharing a translator, these are very different books. Harmange’s polemic is essentially an extended hot take, written in the spirit of the times and the blog format. Easily read in one sitting, the palpably provocative I Hate Men is good fun but hardly incendiary. Its title may bring to the minds of some readers Valerie Solanas’s searing SCUM Manifesto (1967), but while Solanas called for the elimination of men altogether, Harmange is married to one, a situation that allows her to reflect on how loving a man or some men need not preclude “hating men as a social group, and sometimes individual men too.”

Here and there, Harmange dutifully provides statistics about gendered violence and gender inequality at home and at work, but she harbours no pretensions about the depth of her research. The strengths of I Hate Men are in the observations of lived and shared experience and the clarity with which Harmange defines, defends and expands on misandry, as distinct from misogyny and as a potentially galvanising force. She gives short shrift to men who moan about #MeToo and “all this feminist bullshit” and to men who claim to be feminists.

Like many popular feminist books written from the first-person perspective, Harmange doesn’t offer much in the way of feminist strategy other than praising the value of female friendships, including in “book clubs, pyjama parties and girls’ nights out.” I Hate Men, in-your-face title aside, is gateway feminism. As an insight into French feminism, it could come from any vaguely approximate society with a history of white woman–centred feminism.

Springora’s memoir, on the other hand, is a mature work, and marks the literary debut of a talented writer who grew up loving books but turned her back on them in the aftermath of her relationship (for want of a better word) with the famous author, whom she refers to as G.M. when discussing the public figure and G. when describing the controlling and abusive man she came to know. Opening with a reflection on the power and purpose of fairytales, Springora launches her book as an act of revenge and reclamation. The prey will now “ambush” and “ensnare the hunter in his own trap,” the trap being words and books. Like Carmen Maria Machado’s virtuosic memoir of an abusive relationship, In the Dream House (2019), Springora’s book reads as though it has gestated for exactly the right amount of time to produce an instant classic.

Clocking in at less than 200 pages, Consent is both economical and evocative. Springora inducts the reader into her world, aged thirteen, on the precipice of her life-altering first meeting with “G.” at a dinner party. Her parents have split, her father neglectful and mostly absent, her mother loving but distracted. Springora’s sexuality is developing, but she is insecure about her looks and her friendship with her best friend Julien. “All the necessary elements,” she writes, “were now in place.”

Other “necessary elements” included the intellectual circle in which her mother, “a feminist of the May ’68 generation,” moved, if only peripherally, and in which Springora grew up during the 1980s. In this world, G.M. was not only tolerated but venerated. His 1974 essay, Under Sixteen, “a manifesto of sorts calling for the sexual liberation of minors” boosted, rather than undermined, his literary career. A few years later it was G.M. who initiated an open letter in support of the decriminalisation of sexual relations between minors and adults that was published in Le Monde (of course) and signed by intellectual luminaries including Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. His public and private writings overflowed with details of obsessive love affairs with young girls and sexual encounters with teenage boys in the Philippines. Springora indicts G.’s generation and its version of sexual revolution, as well as the special privileges afforded to writers, noting that apart from artists only Catholic priests have historically been “bestowed such a level of impunity.”

She is unflinching when describing what it was like to be involved with G., including sexually, and she does so with the impeccable pacing of the most gripping fairytales. Eventually the “spell” began to lift, but “no Prince Charming came to my aid to slash through the jungle of creepers that bound me to this kingdom of darkness.” Trying to disentangle herself from G., Springora was a girl alone.

This part of the book is the most haunting. What comes in the aftermath of G. — “the imprint” — is essential to the memoir’s impact, though the force of the narrative in the final sections, mercifully perhaps, dissipates somewhat. Springora’s life eventually moves in a positive direction, but it’s also indelibly marked. A whole other book could have focused on her mother, who endorsed her relationship with G.

Unlike Harmange’s polemic, Springora’s memoir is emphatically French and immediately addressed to that context. On that front, there are signs of change. In the past week, French MPs have voted to back a new law that will set the age of consent at fifteen, a first for the country. Springora’s memoir is an acknowledged influence, but it also has wider resonance. “Silence” has been taken to equal “consent,” she writes in the closing pages, but it is “at last, the turn of the victims to speak out” and break it. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Still, #MeToo goes on, not least as a publishing phenomenon. Into this crowded and eclectic field comes a genuinely thought-provoking collection of essays by New York–based writer, editor and journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. Some of these pieces were published or written before the emergence of #MeToo, but are offered as freshly meaningful in its wake. Two come from the 1990s — one on Nushawn Williams, a young, Black man who caused a nationwide scandal when it was revealed he’d infected thirteen young women, some of them white, with HIV; another on the killing of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-year-old student, by two other young men in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, since memorialised as a tragic gay-hate crime.

In the 2000s, Wypijewski covered the case of gay Catholic priest Paul Shanley, convicted and imprisoned in 2004 for raping a child back in 1980, based on the “recovered memories” of one accuser — a story with so many layers that Wypijewski dedicates two essays to it. In another piece, she focuses on the court martial of Lynndie England, the young US army reserve soldier at the centre of the Abu Ghraib scandal. There are other essays too, not all of them as substantial (Wypijewski musters an astute appreciation of Madonna’s Sex book) but each of them animated by a “principled humanity” in which every person — whether labelled victim or suspect — is represented as “one of us, whether ultimately found guilty or not.”

Across a career that spans more than four decades — including as editor of the Nation magazine from 1982 to 2000 — Wypijewski has clearly been around. From this vantage point, she calls out #MeToo, or the American version of it, as a “sex panic.” It’s a term that also applies to the cases above, and in the rousing title essay Wypijewski dissects them as such. She defines a sex, or moral, panic as a “social eruption fanned by the media and characterised by alarm over innocence imperiled,” stereotypically that of white women and children.

Taking her cues from Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), in which anthropologist Roger Lancaster links these “mass convulsions” with the “expansion of state violence,” Wypijewski takes seriously their effects while rallying against them. When a panic takes hold, unwanted caresses are conflated with serious crimes like rape, and “all the stories are true, and the accused are guilty by default.” Conservatives, liberals and feminists have all stirred sex panics, deploying their “inflammatory language” and seeking retribution via the law-and-order mechanisms of what Wypijewski calls the “biggest prison state” in the world.

In these terms, #MeToo is nothing new, but rather the latest iteration of a recurring phenomenon bound up with carceral politics from which no one is exempt, including children. And some people, of course, such as Black boys and men, are much more likely to experience the full force of the police state, to take the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five in 1989 as a stark case in point. Wypijewski is not the first to make these arguments — including in relation to #MeToo — but she makes them with bracing clarity and urgency.

Crucially, Wypijewski moves beyond the sex panic frame in each essay to the “causes and complications” beneath “the stories we think we all know.” Where she truly hits her stride is when she delivers the detail and analysis that the impoverished discourse of moral panic leaves no space for. Against the tabloid account, the hot take or even the fact-checked exposé, she offers both the long view and the close inspection. She is no fan of avenging #MeToo reporters like Ronan Farrow (also featured as a bit player in a sharp and compassionate essay on his father, the disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen) and not above jabs at what she sees as the sensationalist coverage of highly regarded publications including the Boston Globe, which broke the story of “paedophile priests” in the Catholic Church back in 2002, and Vanity Fair. She models a different way of telling a story, to get to what she calls the “mess of life.”

Occasionally, the essays lose shape — there’s a penchant for digression, including childhood recollections. A handy afterword ties up the narrative threads, but several essays would have benefited from their own explanatory notes. And if it’s not obvious by now, these are also very American stories, with limits to their wider applications. In late January alone, #MeToo was trending again in Greece, the Balkans and India.

Readers looking for an in-depth account of #MeToo may be disappointed by What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. Within the terms Wypijewski sets herself, though, this is a remarkably coherent collection, provocative in the best sense. In an era in which #MeToo’s most high-profile convict, Harvey Weinstein, can’t seem to be punished enough — news of his Covid-19 infection was widely and gleefully shared on social media — Wypijewski questions a wider culture that makes monsters out of men. •

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Now, in the dying days of the one-term Trump presidency, two authors — British activist and writer Laura Bates and Australian-born, US-based feminist philosopher Kate Manne — offer a different way of comprehending all that has happened in recent years. In their arrestingly titled new books, Bates and Manne switch their focus to men, or rather patriarchy and its many manifestations. These range from extreme and disturbing misogyny — “incel” Elliot Rodger’s murderous shooting spree in California in 2014 — through to the seemingly intractable everyday patterns that mean men do far less housework, for instance, than women. Inevitably, given flashpoints like Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh, Bates and Manne sometimes cover similar ground, but their projects are also distinctive — reading one should not preclude reading the other.

Manne, building on her first and more academic book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), examines how male entitlement works, and explores its effects, including how women’s bodies are policed but harms against them aren’t taken seriously. As per Down Girl, Manne advances her own vocabulary and theoretical framework, with misogyny described as the “law enforcement branch” of patriarchy, and sexism its “theoretical and ideological branch.” “Himpathy,” first introduced in Down Girl to explain the pervasive but under-examined sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence, returns in tandem with “herasure,” whereby victims and targets of misogyny are blamed for what happened to them, or ignored.

These remain useful terms, but between books Manne has also discovered intersectionality and Entitled accordingly “tackles a range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy and male entitlement work in tandem with a range of other oppressions.” Manne’s analysis of misogyny now takes in transmisogyny and misogynoir — not her own terms — and draws on more scholarship and insights from Black women, non-binary people and women of colour. The book’s strongest chapters — on bodily control and medical care — benefit most from her new intersectional approach.

Manne’s enlarged focus justifies a new book that elsewhere recycles some of the same arguments and case studies as Down Girl. It’s also pleasing to read a book by a feminist academic aimed at a wide audience. Manne moves smoothly from examples of male entitlement in pop culture to cogent analysis of anti-abortion rhetoric and legislation. She pokes holes in complicit and complacent media rhetoric about whether women are “electable” to the highest office, and research that purportedly shows men to be more stoic about pain than women. Her concluding chapter, in which she cautiously hopes for a more justly entitled future for her daughter and other girls, is sufficiently galvanising.

Yet for all its obvious strengths, Entitled is a somewhat uneven book, and some sections appear to have been written in haste. Pages and pages are dedicated to labouring an example or case study — say, the play Gas Light or the podcast series Dirty John — creating a padding effect. Elsewhere, in paying tribute to Black feminist writers like Tressie McMillan Cottom, Manne seems to assume her readership would not already be aware of this work. For a writer who skilfully scrutinises the practice of “mansplaining,” Manne doesn’t seem aware of her own occasional tendency to tip over into an adjacent explanatory style, though she does dutifully acknowledge her privilege and subjectivity.

Manne’s book is mostly focused on American examples, though the odd Australian reference — including to Julia Gillard, Alan Jones and Geoffrey Rush — pops up. By contrast, I lost count of the Australian examples in Laura Bates’s more substantial and ambitious investigation of contemporary misogyny, which makes for bracing reading. In Men Who Hate Women, Bates convincingly argues that the so-called fringe online world of the “manosphere” has a ripple effect way beyond the online subcultures of “incels” (short for involuntary celibates), pickup artists and men’s rights activists who gather on platforms like Reddit and 4chan.

Bates’s entry point is personal: as a public feminist and educator, she has been a frequent target of trolls and men’s rights activists, and subject to death threats. In recent years, she’s also noticed how some teenage boys she works with in schools have begun to sprout the rhetoric and false statistics of the manosphere. Now, in an exhaustively researched and carefully argued fashion, she joins the dots between the manosphere, the alt-right and mainstream media and politics.

Readers will be familiar with at least some examples of the mainstreaming of misogynist and sexist views — the language used by the outgoing American president being a case in point — but Bates’s skill is in drawing familiar and new material together in freshly revealing and insightful ways, including by historicising these male communities and putting them in a transnational frame. Men’s rights activists, for instance, emerged from a “devastating schism” in the men’s liberation movement in the United States, and now its most prominent organisations and spokespeople are virulently anti-feminist, retailing false statistics and claims about rates of false rape allegations and men as victims of domestic violence. In Australia, prominent men’s rights activists have been given airtime on Seven’s Sunrise and have directly influenced politics, most recently Pauline Hanson’s successful call for an inquiry into family violence. Hanson, without producing evidence, claimed women routinely lie about abuse to gain advantage in court.

The size of these online communities — some of which overlap and all of which exhibit consistent and virulent misogyny, as well as racism and homophobia — is almost impossible to estimate with “any great accuracy,” writes Bates, but she succeeds in capturing a strong sense of their outsize and real-world influence. At the same time, she refutes the standard arguments used to dismiss or minimise what is evidently a globally interconnected phenomenon. She routinely and powerfully condemns the media for reductively polarised representations of incels (for example) as either “darkly violent and misogynist” or “a mischaracterised and disadvantaged group of lonely men.” The reality, writes Bates, “is that both these stories are true,” and herein lies the value of her book.

Bates pays attention to a whole spectrum of engagements with, and effects of, the manosphere. These include young boys who venture onto online platforms looking for advice or a sense of community and are gradually radicalised; “respectable” representatives of misogynist views, such as Jordan Peterson, who create and capitalise on what has become a booming market; and the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the horrific Christchurch massacre in March 2019. Tarrant had links to “the troll culture of the chans, the alt-right and the manosphere,” but even more than this, argues Bates, “his entire act of hatred was planned, framed and performed within that world.”

The impact of Bates’s book is cumulative: by the end I was in no doubt that Bates had exhaustively identified and reckoned with a real and urgent problem. She wants “extremist misogyny” to be taken at least as seriously as other contemporary forms of radicalism and extremism: indeed, she contends, misogyny is typically a constitutive element, but not recognised as such because hatred against women is so normalised. I’m still mulling over some of her more specific solutions and strategies — which range from more youth social workers through to legislating online misogyny as hate speech — but it’s a credit to Bates that she offers so many of them. In the final pages, she confesses her fear about potential reactions to the book but declares it is “also an act of resistance.” Men Who Hate Women is a brave book, and it deserves a wide readership. •

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The photo is dated “c. 1950,” when she was twenty-year-old Merle Wilson and a student at the University of Sydney, a period she describes as “the happiest time of my life.” It was there that she met her future husband, a bookish returned soldier named Neil Thornton; together, they would raise a family and have many adventures. Around 1950, the adventures included discovering sex, being in thrall to the philosopher John Anderson and mixing with the Libertarians who eventually morphed into the Sydney Push, the bohemian scene that incubated Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes and other notables.

The Sydney Push would become notorious for its sexism, but by then Merle had moved on to the public service, where she quickly developed strategies to combat boredom and land the better gigs. “Before Germaine, there was Merle,” declares the cover blurb, and indeed there was. We’re very fortunate that Germaine Greer and Merle Thornton are both still with us, but while we know a lot about Greer — too much, perhaps — how much do even the most dedicated students of Australian feminism know about Thornton, other than the 1965 Regatta Hotel protest she is best known for, and perhaps the fact that she’s the mother of actor Sigrid Thornton? Until now, not nearly enough.

What Merle Thornton tells us about her life and times is, on any measure, the right amount — not too much, not too little, coy in parts but candid elsewhere, and vivid throughout. It’s a fast, breezy read, written with the assistance of Melanie Ostell, and grew out of a stage show, Frank and Fearless, commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival, in which Thornton shared stories with her daughter.

It’s a memoir that also wants to inspire and instruct, with life lessons and maxims peppered throughout. The narrative is chronological, peaking in the 1970s, with occasional pauses to showcase “indelible moments” and “bookish influences.” These features sometimes tip over into whimsy, but the overall effect is endearing. As a narrator, Thornton is consistently good company. Crucially, she knows she is a historically significant figure but doesn’t over-inflate her importance. And even without the better-known parts, the nine-decade span of her life makes for fascinating social history.

Thornton was born during the Great Depression and attended Fort Street Girl’s High in Sydney in the 1940s, at a time when the majority of her classmates left school at fifteen. In one memorable observation, she contrasts the femininities of university-bound young women like herself (“dowdy matrons in our black cotton stockings”) and the contemporaries who left school to enter the world of work and romance “dressed in fashionable pencil skirts” with “proper hairdos,” who were like “colourful birds.” “It’s an interesting paradox,” she notes, “that we would learn many different things that these women would never know about, and yet we remained children for so much longer.”

Merle Thornton (right) and Rosalie Bogner chained to the footrail at the Regatta Hotel, Toowong, in March 1965. Bruce Postle/Newspix

By contemporary standards, Thornton’s life path might be the more common one — she graduated from university, got married, had children and continued to work, study and travel — but some of the most fascinating sections of the book evoke how different Australia was in the 1950s and 1960s, especially for women.

As a university student, she was an anomaly; as a public servant she had to hide her marriage (and for as long as she was able, her first pregnancy) in order to keep her job. In the first decade of her marriage she used a cap and spermicide for contraception, and she recalls that “preparing for sex could be a slow, at times embarrassing and potentially shaming learning experience subject to trial and error.” The arrival of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s is duly recognised for the seismic event that it was, even if the initial batch gave her migraines.

The 1960s became her decade. At the University of Queensland, where her husband took up a lecturing post in 1960, Thornton threw herself into campus life. In her first direct action, she stormed down the corridor from the dull women’s staffroom to the male common room and sat down, “heart thumping.” Never a fan of single-sex organisations or segregated socialising, she wanted the right to be where the conversation was, regardless of her sex.

In this spirit, Thornton and her friend Rosalie Bogner staged her next direct action, this time on a much more ambitious scale. They chained themselves to the front bar of the Regatta Hotel on 31 March 1965 to protest against liquor laws that excluded women from drinking there. With the press tipped off, their novel action made headlines around the world and inspired a wave of similar protests. For all of its spectacular qualities, however, it’s the quotidian details of the protest that stand out, including the large kilt pin she used to cinch the waist of her skirt, and the performance of deep conversation with Bogner as the action played out. “I have no recollection of what we said to each other,” Thornton recalls, “and wouldn’t be surprised if it was ‘rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.’”

After the Regatta protest, which comes around three-quarters of the way through, the memoir’s energy dissipates somewhat. Riding on the protest’s momentum, Thornton became a “go-to person on the issue of equal rights” and established the Equal Opportunities for Women Association, which successfully lobbied for the removal of the “marriage bar” from the Public Service Act in 1966.

But while Thornton has remained a dedicated feminist, including as a foundational figure in women’s studies at the University of Queensland, women’s liberation was never quite to her taste. Hers is a politics of like-minded people working together for a common cause, whether it’s libertarianism and free thought, Aboriginal rights or equal opportunities for men and women. If at times these principles strike the reader as old-fashioned, this book also provides plenty of reminders — including the groovy cover — that Merle Thornton was a genuine trailblazer. •

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In her refreshing new pop history Difficult Women, British journalist Helen Lewis makes room for the likes of Stopes, one of the better-known figures profiled among an eclectic (though mainly British) group that also includes working-class suffragette Annie Kenney, trailblazing football player Lily Parr and Maureen Colquhoun, who in the 1970s became the first “out” MP in British history. The subtitle — A History of Feminism in 11 Fights — refers to how the book is thematically organised around various struggles (like divorce reform, the vote and access to education), most of which remain unfinished or ongoing business (sex, love, work and, perhaps especially, time). Hers is a productive approach — the examples are mostly confined to Britain but still have the capacity to surprise or even enrage, and every theme translates to Australia. While we have had no-fault divorce since 1975, they still don’t have it in Britain. Access to safe abortion remains an issue everywhere, and every victory is hard-won.

For readers attuned to feminist debate and conflict, the subtitle also suggests a history of feminists fighting each other over the best way forward. And while there’s certainly some of that, including Lewis’s sharing of her own exasperation with present-day “woke” culture and what she sees as its unreasonable demands, the real substance here is in her vivid accounts of a range of feminist causes and the women who have helped to advance them. Her appreciation of her subjects — even, or especially, when she disagrees with them or they’re not particularly likeable — is contagious.

Some of the difficult women are long dead, among them Caroline Norton, who began lobbying for women’s custodial rights in the 1830s when she lost custody of her own children after her husband George sensationally put her on trial for adultery. Or Sophia Jex-Blake, one of the Edinburgh Seven campaigners who won the right for women to study medicine in the 1870s (with the “proviso that lecturers did not have to teach them alongside the men”). When required, Lewis dutifully and sometimes performatively speaks to historians and visits archives, but she’s best in journalist mode, interviewing surviving “difficult women” or activists who continue the fight.

These include the formidable Erin Pizzey, possibly the most influential domestic violence campaigner of all. Pizzey would be a “feminist hero,” writes Lewis, if not for the fact that her theories about gendered violence have morphed so far from feminist analysis that her most receptive audience is now among men’s rights activists. Lewis offers a sympathetic and clear-eyed account, reinforcing the point that “Pizzey’s difficult relationship with feminism does not mean that she has to be written out of the story.”

Lewis is no feminist theorist, but mostly this works to the book’s advantage. She concludes with her own manifesto for difficult women, by which stage the point has already been well made. Of greater interest is how she brings different feminist activists, thinkers and texts together around a shared theme. In the chapter on time, she interviews sociologist Arlie Hochschild, best known for the sometimes-misused term “emotional labour,” about how her own experiences as a working mother informed books like The Second Shift (1989). Lewis also gives due credit to Selma James as a feminist visionary, noting that her 1952 pamphlet, “A Woman’s Place,” written from the perspective of a working-class, immigrant woman, anticipated Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) by over a decade.

Lewis’s ambivalence about the campaign for which James is most famous — Wages for Housework — makes for a layered and lively analysis, including for readers like me who gravitate more to James’s politics than those of Lewis. Nor does it preclude her from having a lightbulb moment about the Marxist influence on feminism. “It’s an odd quirk of history,” writes Lewis, “that most of today’s younger feminists know little about Marxism” yet “we have inherited an intellectual tradition steeped in it.”

The Marxist influence on feminism includes intersectionality, a feminist theory Lewis is better at applying than pontificating about. She offers, for example, a thoughtful and fresh account of Jayaben Desai, who as a recent South Asian migrant led the historic strike at the Grunwick film-processing lab in the mid 1970s. Elsewhere, Lewis wades into what she calls the “intersectionality wars.” As a high-profile, white, middle-class feminist in Britain, Lewis has been targeted as irredeemably privileged, but her lamenting of this treatment reads as more defensive than insightful.

Mercifully, she keeps that discussion short, otherwise it might have dated or limited the appeal of what is a pleasingly ambitious and wide-ranging feminist read. While immersed in it, and ever since, I’ve been imagining an Australian equivalent. As Lewis so effectively demonstrates, difficult women have been a driving force wherever feminism has taken root, and it’s important to honour them, flaws and all. •

Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
By Helen Lewis | Jonathan Cape | $35 | 368 pages

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Lee’s follow-up, Beauty, has an equally arresting cover and is similarly compelling. But it’s also more modest in size and ambition, despite the hefty cultural baggage of its title. Beauty is a personal essay in which Lee pursues a narrative and personal thread first introduced in Eggshell Skull. Lee writes that she grappled with whether to include details of her “small ritual” of vomiting after dinner in that book, and ultimately decided to go with it. In Beauty, she inspects her own “obsession with thinness” more closely, cognisant that it’s both an “embarrassing admission” and one that wider society endorses.

Beauty opens in early 2018, on the eve of Eggshell Skull’s publication, with Lee in seeming control of her disordered eating. Yet the looming publicity tour was reawakening her “longing to purge again.” The plot, such as it is, takes the reader from Lee’s determination to hit her goal weight for a glamorous photo shoot for a women’s magazine through to hard-won self-acceptance via ruminations on and research into “beauty” and associated themes. Lee’s light-bulb moment is shared close to midway — “In harming myself, I was harming others. The jig was up” — effectively dividing the essay into two parts, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

In the opening sixty pages or so, Lee reveals the extent and character of her quest for “perfection.” Like many women, she recalls a time when she almost achieved it, at least physically. She was praised for how good she looked, even though — or because — her weight was “right on the borderline of an ‘unhealthy’ BMI.” Lee embarks on a new diet and exercise regime and follows model Georgia Fowler and the Skinny Bitch Collective (“infamous for granting membership only to the already trimmest-of-trim women”) on Instagram for inspiration and motivation.

There’s an admirable fearlessness to Lee’s writing in this section. She needs the reader not to like her but to comprehend what she once valued as “beauty” and what it cost her to do so. In one stand-out passage, the prose soars: “Self-improvement without self-loathing seemed impossible. In life you had to be both the horse and the jockey: whipping and giving directions while your own lungs filled with blood.”

Perhaps inevitably though, given the unrelenting and repetitive cycle of “perfectionism” that Lee is documenting in one of its most common and gendered forms, there are moments early on when the point feels already made. Contemporary beauty ideals are a sham, they hurt people, especially women, and they feed capitalism. Social media, of course, makes everything worse, but the literature Lee draws on to make sense of this does not add much that is new to the conversation. I preferred her own words, like “Girls are told their bodies aren’t valuable, then people roll their eyes if the girls themselves treat their bodies like trash.”

Lee pans out more widely in the second and most substantial part of the essay, to mixed effect. Her arguments are most lucid and powerful when she’s focused on the ongoing perversity and damage of the thinness ideal. As she notes, the fashion industry has made some token gestures towards body diversity, but its modus operandi remains business as usual. “It’s mind-blowing,” she writes, “how everyone always says someone else is responsible. The buck stops nowhere.”

More urgently, she forcefully condemns continued denial of the “damage done by eating disorders,” in particular anorexia, which has “the highest death rate of all psychiatric illnesses.” Lee’s reflections on the tragic fate of the astonishingly talented singer Amy Winehouse — who was obviously suffering from an eating disorder, though her death was officially categorised otherwise — are probably the best in an essay not short of arresting passages.

Where Lee is less successful is in expanding the potential of what constitutes “beauty.” It’s on this front that the limited utility of her somewhat privileged experience and embodiment as an able-bodied white woman is most obvious. A chance encounter with musician Nkechi Anele, who is of African descent, sparks some intersectional thinking about how racism compounds sexism, but one is left wondering what would have happened had they not crossed paths. Lee could have turned to any number of books, blogs and articles from women writing from diverse perspectives on similar themes, but it is as though fat activism — to name one obvious omission — never happened. Such absences give parts of the essay an oddly retro feel, exacerbated by extended engagement with Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990).

Still, as long as mainstream perceptions of “beauty” continue to be represented by women such as actor Jennifer Aniston — who recently revealed her latest “beauty” secret to be fasting most of the day, with celery juice for a treat — writing from feminists such as Wolf and Lee will continue to make a mark. Ultimately, the impact of Lee’s essay will depend on how resonant her experiences are to her readers. •

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Now, while I wasn’t entirely wrong — for Gordon-Smith is indeed witty and the chapters do stand alone as essays — I was mostly wrong. Stop Being Reasonable defies easy classification, but it’s certainly not a solipsistic first-person endeavour. Instead, Gordon-Smith has written an engaging, outward-looking book that invites readers to contemplate what it means to exercise reason, to hold beliefs, to experience emotions and to have your worldview challenged or even shattered. These are huge questions, and even when broken down into more manageable chunks they have preoccupied philosophers for entire careers and across generations. Gordon-Smith sensibly and entertainingly brings them down to earth by hooking them to true human stories, or what she calls the “muddy reality of being a person.”

Of special interest to Gordon-Smith is the question of what it takes to change a person’s mind, an inquiry prompted by a failed experiment she conducted, the outcome of which changed her own mind about the persuasive power of evidence and “reason.” Over a number of weeks, armed with recording equipment, she hit Sydney’s Kings Cross to pose a question to the passing parade of catcallers: “What were you hoping for just then?” She expected to follow up this opening gambit — and “reason them out of doing it again” — by appealing to research and her own authority as a woman.

Instead, she was flummoxed to find that while most of the men she approached were open and friendly — and willing to be recorded — they believed that women responded positively to their banter, their pats on the bottom and their suggestive winks. Edited down, the experiment made for a memorable, if squirm-inducing, episode of the popular US radio program This American Life. In prose, however, without the intimate proximity audio can provide, the catcalling experiment is comparatively flat on the page — or perhaps I never accepted the terms of the experiment in the first place, including the presumed benefits of a “rational conversation.” The radio episode generated major interest and seeded the idea for the book as a whole, but here it stands somewhat apart, a mildly diverting curiosity, from the more compelling five chapters that follow.

At least three of the true stories presented by Gordon-Smith could be ripped from the tabloids or the plots of made-for-television movies. Man leaves religious cult for the love of a truly good woman. Wife accidentally discovers her husband is an adulterer and a paedophile. Happy, middle-aged man learns he is adopted soon after two strangers knock on his front door. One case is literally taken from reality television, albeit from its early, more unpredictable and less-scripted days: Alex, an Oxbridge toff, passes as a bouncer on the British series Faking It, an experiment so invigorating he breaks out of the straitjacket of a fixed self.

In each chapter, Gordon-Smith pans in and out from the quotidian and sometimes sensational details of the case studies to the larger questions that animate her project. Her approach is probing and inquisitive but also deeply empathetic. Rather than judge her subjects for any perceived lapses in judgement or reason, she humanises them and their plight. Instead of reiterating tired mantras like “she must have known” about Susie, who accidentally discovered her husband John’s dark past on the family computer, she questions the assumption that emotion or trust are antithetical to reason or logic, for “trust has its own claim to being rational… [for] it is rational to trust because intimate relationships require it.”

The most perplexing story centres on Nicole Kluemper, already famous in the United States as a contested example of someone with repressed memory of child sexual abuse. The various twists and turns of this case have left the adult Kluemper unsure of the validity or content of her own memories, as well as her identity as a survivor of abuse. Given this rich and gritty material, and Gordon-Smith’s access to the players involved — including the controversial and indefatigable psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, author of The Myth of Repressed Memory (1994) — it is not surprising that this is both the most engrossing and the most (necessarily) irresolute chapter. Gordon-Smith’s skill here is to not take sides — other than Kluemper’s — which makes for riveting reading.

Gordon-Smith peppers Stop Being Reasonable with insights and propositions from well-known and lesser-known philosophers and critical thinkers. She casts her net wide and her choices for a particular conundrum or theme can be refreshingly eclectic, as they are in the chapter about Alex, who rejects the predictable life he was born into as a member of the upper class. Here, Gordon-Smith sweeps Oliver Sacks, Virginia Woolf, Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan and British banker-cum-philosopher Peter Goldie, among others, into formidable teams of defenders and opponents of the idea of a stable self. She also writes vividly of her own first encounters with philosophical thought, including that of René Descartes (of course) and nineteenth-century mathematician William Clifford. Reflecting on Clifford’s equation of doubt with moral courage, she writes, “I loved the pure anarchy of the way philosophy like this tried to leave you with less knowledge instead of more.”

Gordon-Smith clearly knows and loves philosophy — she’s a graduate student in Princeton University’s prestigious philosophy department — and is obviously adept at communicating it to a broader audience. In addition to her work on This American Life, she’s been a researcher and interviewer on Radio National’s long-running program The Philosopher’s Zone. Yet while Stop Being Reasonable falls broadly into the genre of “pop philosophy,” I found the strengths of the book to be storytelling and character rather than its passages of philosophical writing in the mode of popularisers like Alain de Botton. For all of de Botton’s irritating qualities — and he’s clearly as divisive a figure as he is an influential and successful one — his blending of plot and philosophy in early books like On Love was audaciously clever.

More recently, Australian writer Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman impressed with its thoughtful merging of memoir and feminist philosophy. Like Gordon-Smith, van Loon encourages a generous definition of philosophy, but she also dedicates more time to introducing and explaining her chosen philosophers and their work. At times, in its philosophical content, Stop Being Reasonable feels rushed and underdeveloped. I was left wanting more, which is a compliment as well as a criticism. Gordon-Smith is clearly a gifted writer and thinker, and Stop Being Reasonable bodes very well for her future work on the page and on the airwaves. •

Stop Being Reasonable
By Eleanor Gordon-Smith | NewSouth | $27.99 | 274 pages

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