JILL JOLLIFFE Run for Your Life: A memoir. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The author of Balibó turns her focus on herself with this gripping examination of how a traumatic childhood shapes an entire life. How long does it take to see your own story? For Jill Jolliffe, it was only after a lifetime of reporting the experiences of people in...
ALOM SHAHA The Young Atheist’s Handbook: Lessons for living the good life without God. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
Rather than a handbook, this is a generous and thoughtful memoir of a life in pursuit of intellectual freedom. Belief and non-belief do not sit well with something like a 12-step plan and this book is in fact not a handbook but a memoir; a warm,...
HILLY JANES The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas. Reviewed by Peter Corris
This book commemorates the 100th anniversary of Thomas’s birth and offers new insights into his life. We ‘did’ Dylan Thomas in the fourth year of the Honours course in English at Melbourne University and I bought his Collected Poems second-hand at the...
JUSTIN HEAZLEWOOD Funemployed: The life of an artist in Australia. Reviewed by Walter Mason
Warning: reading this book can get you down if you are a creative in Australia trying to establish or maintain a career. Justin Heazlewood’s brilliant Funemployed is not all happiness and light. But in spite of its, ahem, realistic portrayal of the scene for...
TARA MOSS The Fictional Woman. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Bestselling crime novelist Tara Moss examines the fictions society weaves about women’s roles, and how they have played out in her own life. I haven’t read Tara Moss’s fiction, but I have come to know about her and her writing through her advocacy, particularly as...
MEREDITH BURGMANN (Ed) Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO files. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Absurdity and anger reside in this anthology of personal responses to ASIO’s clumsy and calumnious file-keeping. Meredith Burgmann’s Introduction to this fascinating book foreshadows some of the themes that emerge repeatedly as the contributors discuss their own or...
EDMUND WHITE Inside a Pearl: My years in Paris. Reviewed by Walter Mason
Telling stories he shouldn’t: the gossipy, titillating and always fascinating world of Edmund White’s Paris. There is something deliciously circular about Edmund White’s fiction and memoirs. I have been reading them constantly since I was a teenager in the late 1980s,...
BIFF WARD In My Mother’s Hands: A disturbing memoir of family life. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
A family haunted by a tragic death and terrorised by a disease they couldn’t name. Families are as defined by their secrets as they are by their blood ties. The secrets Biff (Elizabeth) Ward’s family kept united them, tormented them and ultimately divided them. Biff...
MORRISSEY Autobiography. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
Morrissey presents his case with palpable bitterness in a book that offers validation in the end. Bitterness and revenge inform this eponymous autobiography, or at least large chunks of it. Morrissey disses his bandmates, his record label, the press and the judges of...
SHERI FINK Five Days at Memorial: Life and death in a storm-ravaged hospital. Reviewed by Sonia Nair
This book examines human behaviour and moral choices in a hospital fighting for its patients’ lives and its own in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was like a knife, death. Always waiting to cut. The medical profession is predicated upon saving lives and...
CLARE WRIGHT The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
This book restores women’s place in an iconic period of Australian history in a tale of grit, suffering and determination. On the cover of the hardback of Clare Wright’s Stella-Prize-winning history is a fragment of the Eureka flag. Tattered and yellowed...
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