For Life by Ailsa Piper, Allen & Unwin, 2024
This is a memoir of grief and loss. Ailsa Piper loses both her husband and father and you’ll be left to wonder how so much loss and the life which follows, can read so beautifully.
After recently losing my mum, I’m not sure why I picked this up, if it was pressing a bruise or permission to feel and find common ground with others who are mourning. Reading it, there was the realisation again that life and loss co-exist, neither one of them stopping to respectfully give way to the other.
The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Text Publishing, 2008
Another memoir about dying. I wasn’t deliberately picking them up, I promise, but just like the parent-dying movies which came my way, I didn’t avoid them either. This is Helen Garner’s account of her terminally ill friend coming to live with her to do a series of dubious Vitamin C treatments which promise to heal her.
It’s Garner, so we know that no one will be spared from the truth of ungenerous feelings, how slow death can be, how caring for the sick can be maddening and how even in the face of mortality we can bicker and be our own human selves.
Fine just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx, 4th Estate, 2008
Apart from two satires about the devil which didn’t really land with me, this is typical Annie Proulx short story territory – the landscape is always there, never a bit player, constantly bending characters into and out of their own shape, the lives are small and often short and the writing is of course, sublime.
An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister, Allen & Unwin, 2025
Sadie and Jonah have been at uni together for 15 years. There’s always been a rivalry between them intensified by his little rich boy status and her battler background. This amps up as their academic careers progress and they compete for the same few positions. Then a partner-hire position comes up in Tasmania and they could both have it if they can make people believe that they’re a couple.
This was as much about the current precarious state of universities as it was an academic romance. It was also a break from everything being so big and hard and assured like in the Ali Hazelwood STEM romances I’ve been reading – nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to know that enemies can find their way to lovers even when they’re not an Alpha male with Adam Driver proportions.
Butter by Asako Yuzuki, 4th Estate, 2024
Rika is a journalist for a men’s magazine. She works hard and is determined to get an interview with Manako Kajii, the infamous murderer who is accused of seducing three men with her cooking and killing them. The pair initially start writing letters, discussing food and recipes. Then Rika starts to visit and have a gastronomic awakening.
As with a few of the other Japanese books I’ve read over the past few years, there is the constant and suffocating expectations and lack of opportunity around what kind of woman you can be. I wanted to love this. I wanted to support its critique of societal expectations for women and of course I wanted to join all the millions of international readers who turned it into a best seller but I kept falling asleep when I picked it up and never finished.
Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Serpent’s Tail, 2017
A collection of short stories, some almost from a dreamscape. The back cover bestows a lot of adjectives – unique, original, genre-demolishing, sensual and wild. There was a particularly prescient story of a modern plague society which would’ve been written and published before we’d even heard of COVID 19.
I didn’t read them all. There was a bleakness and darkness that was too much for me right now. It seems I can do memoirs about death but not general societal sadness.
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Nina Cullen 