I didn’t move to Mexico to fall in love. It happened, as love does, unexpectedly. Prior to meeting my partner, I knew that I would have to pick up my long-lost Spanish where I had left it more than 15 years ago: on bits of scrap paper, my homework written hastily in between classes and hangovers while I was studying at the University of Sydney. Learning Spanish all those years ago was a lesson in what not to do, I mumbled to myself when I took the mandatory entry exam to restart my learning. If I was going to live […]

The future is now When my brother left home in the 90s for the blinking lights of the IT boom, he gifted me something. I’d grown up with his penchant for sci-fi and intense 70s prog, but this was new: a space man called David Bowie. Unlike Freddy Mercury, who I wanted to marry, I didn’t want to be with Bowie: I wanted to be Bowie. Or, no, it’s more psychological than that. Our dad had died just before I was born and my 12-year-old brain pretty much slotted Bowie in as a vague approximation. I had, after all, grown […]

Reading American Literature Readying myself for isolation during the Great Pandemic of 2020, I naturally went to my local bookstore to stockpile necessities, had a heavy discussion with one of the sellers about finally making time to reread old favourites. He named the Russians and I said Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, having secretly claimed African American literature a birthright since leaving my home in the United States twenty-one years ago, my skin white like spaces between the words that have consistently taught me right from wrong. I remember being twelve, newly bleeding. It’s near-to summer and the scent of magnolia […]

A Burns Philp general store was my childhood gateway to the world. My parents were based in Kavieng, the main town on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. The general store commandeered the main street, providing expatriates with some basic comforts from overseas. It was also the only place on the island that stocked books. Amongst the jumble of shelves displaying canned food, processed cheese and tins of powdered milk, was a solitary, somewhat lopsided, arrangement of idiosyncratic titles. Restocking of this shelf was haphazard. But whenever it was replenished, I pleaded with Mum to spend a […]

Archetypes: A Reading Guide Books are full of words that are ingested like medicine. Their benefits, largely intangible, linger long after the book is closed. Books are powerful with the capacity to change lives and alter how we relate to the world. As Mrs Constance Winterson liked to say, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in them until it’s too late’. A book is a presence conjured by a being that speaks to us of other realms. The creator embodies an archetype to shape a work with a life of its own.   The Magician …works […]

Making sense of pain and chaos   My children were returned to me when schools closed last year. At five and seven, their lives had just been uprooted in the wake of family separation, shunting them from a big block in the country with a trampoline and a treehouse, to two tiny apartments in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s fair to say that things felt uncertain, precarious and hard. At that point, I read Deborah Levy’s memoir again. The Cost of Living reflects on remaking a life in the wake of divorce. ‘The writing you are reading now is made from […]

Lately, people in my life keep asking me: ‘Do you read fiction at all? Or do you just read memoir?’ The first time I’m asked the question, I smile. ‘Of course I read fiction,’ I reply. ‘Don’t you remember me posting Instagram stories about being obsessed with Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach and Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children during lockdown?’ When I am asked the question again by someone else, at a post-lockdown brunch, I give a vague response but am disquieted by it. Later, I check my book-tracking app. Sure enough, I haven’t been reading many novels. I add about […]

The last book launch I went to before the pandemic was for Ellena Savage’s excellent Blueberries. This is also the last book I can clearly remember reading. Earlier today, I opened the notebook where I recorded the titles I read in 2020. After Blueberries was Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy; Jenny Offill’s Weather; and Tara June Winch’s The Yield. After that, Svetlana Alexievich’s brilliant Voices from Chernobyl. Then nothing. I remember reading Voices from Chernobyl slowly. At the time, I thought it was because it was such a harrowing book that I was inadvertently pacing myself. Now I suspect that it […]

The New True Crime: a case for empathy over voyeurism   …the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. – Edgar Allan Poe   I am swimming in a deep dark sea of terrible stories. I’ve been doing a deep dive into true crime and 2020 has found me buried in books, physical and virtual, plus essays, journalism and podcasts (so many podcasts). Bound up in brutality, violence and other people’s trauma, I’m beginning to wonder: what are the consequences of immersing in a genre obsessed with dead women and girls? \\ […]

Perhaps thanks to Joyelle McSweeney’s Dead Youth, or, the Leaks: a play in 4 acts (2014), which is also a closet drama a la Goethe or Gertrude Stein and thus perfectly amenable to the theatrophobic—pertinent to our interrupted spectacle?—I have been excavating for leaks. It is hard to believe that this poem, or play, is pre-Trump-era, pre-Covid-19. Wait a second. That isn’t hard to believe at all. DEAD YOUTH 2: What a day at the races. DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s hard work, this afterlife (25). Everything accelerates in late capitalism. What oozes comes from what is; whatever is contained nonetheless transmits. […]

Somewhere overseas, more than a decade ago, I was among a group of poets, novelists and translators, who were visiting another writer at his historic home. Inside, before I could ask anyone about the house, its age and its style, I found myself knocking on a wall. Days later, one of the novelists who had been there said, with a chuckle: That is the difference between us—a novelist would begin by describing the house; a poet knocks on the wall to check that it is real. * In thinking about the topic ‘What I am Reading’, I was stalled for […]

I might as well be honest. A great year of reading it was not. I had a baby in May this year, in the first flush of the pandemic, so I feel zero sense of shame about what I did or did not read. I figure whatever I get around to is a bit like yoga: doing anything is a win, even if I just lie there breathing and trying to follow what’s going on. First, I can definitely tell you what I have not been reading. I did not read Defoe’s The Plague, Camus’ La Peste, or any other […]