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 […]

The romance and horror of the navigable world I amuse myself by finding patterns in and between the books I tumble into, or stumble over, or on occasion drag myself through, grumbling. Lately, I have been able to gather many of them loosely with a theme I think of as the romance of the navigable world. These books do not shatter or rebuild the world; instead, they share the pleasant and dangerous fiction that the rules of the world can be learned. It is a dream that unites aviation histories and Regency romances, crime fiction, and business development guides. I […]

During my adolescence I read almost nothing. I lived on farms. When I was 19 someone gave me a copy of Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector and it blew my head off. White’s style captured me, his acerbic poetry and mordant (almost cruel) representations of art and artists and society people in Sydney. Characters come and go in vivid takes and take-downs (by the author) in what I later realised was White’s typical satire and grotesquerie—the latter as a kind of gothic lightning. I had realised the style of authorial narration. I woke as a reader … Recently, I fell […]

The Queer Reader 101 booklist started as a joke between my girlfriend and me. I say started, because now there’s an actual stack on my bedside table: The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith), Valencia (Michelle Tea), Written on the Body (Jeanette Winterson) and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Andrea Lawlor). I’ve added some Eileen Myles and Ivan Coyote, and Angela Steidele’s Gentleman Jack. But since I’m a slow and distracted novel reader, so far I have only begun each of these, dipping in and out, taking breaks. I spent one of those breaks replaying the video game […]

When my eldest child was ten, he liked to read multiple books at once, arranged in a circle around him on his bed like a giant book buffet. He would pick one up, read a few pages, sometimes even just a paragraph or two, then put it down and move onto another. As a serial monogamist when it came to books, I was horrified. For me, reading had always been an act of immersion. Surely, he was just skimming along the surface of these books, barely getting his mind wet. I remember asking his teacher if I should encourage him […]

‘Warm-ups’ by Abigail Ulman In the first week of lockdown in Brisbane, my friend texted me three words: GET DISNEY PLUS. She has a 5-year-old. I have two little kids. GET DISNEY PLUS, she yelled at me again, even though I had not replied the first time. So I did. Then I bought Stan as well, to watch Normal People, certain that I’d remember to cancel my subscription as soon as I finished it. Or the next month, or the one after that, but here we are in November. Eventually, of course I will cancel my Stan subscription. In short: […]