Reviewed: Sweet Nothings, Madison Griffiths, Ultimo Press

The woman who finds herself sleeping with her professor is invariably special, wise beyond her years, not like the other girls. Or that’s how the story goes—these are often the sweet nothings whispered into students’ ears.

Pedagogical relationships justified by specialness are a key point of interrogation in Madison Griffiths’ latest work, Sweet Nothings. Despite the insistence that the chosen student is somehow different from the rest, the ubiquity of such stories reveals a particular mundanity. Griffiths is exasperated: ‘the same stale plot lives in every nexus of prestige where men reign supreme… how boring it all is’. Ultimately, many of these students find, just as Griffiths does, that all along they—we— are not the exception but the rule.