Emma Grey takes the chick-lit genre to disturbing terrain.
Pictures of You
Emma Grey
Penguin, $34.99
Following her debut romance The Last Love Note, Emma Grey’s Pictures of You takes the conventions of chick-lit into more disturbing terrain. Evie Hudson is recovering from an accident that killed her husband and has left her with retrograde amnesia. The 30-year-old doesn’t remember much of her adult life – she thinks she’s still 16 – and the novel has her piecing together her past with the help of Drew, her best friend at high school (who still has the hots for her at 30, even though she’s mentally still a teenager due to the amnesia, which is all kinds of creepy). The novel is split between teenage Evie and her recovery. In the process, it reconstructs memories of an abusive relationship, and how Evie might have come to marry a man who isolated, undermined and controlled her. Grey is acute on domestic violence, and especially the psychological impact of repeated manipulation on victims. The set-up is better than the hastily sketched resolution, but I can imagine Colleen Hoover fans making TikTok videos of themselves sobbing over the toxic relationship dynamics in this one.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Lisette
Catherine Rey
Gazebo Books, $24.99
A deceptively simple, impressively crafted recollection of friendship.
In August 2002, French-born novelist Catherine Rey made a commitment to write about her fellow French friend, the eponymous Lisette. Rey was 45, Lisette Nigot was 79 and had decided to end her life before reaching the age of 80. It took Rey 20 years to feel ready to fulfil the commitment. The result is a deceptively simple, beautifully poised recollection of Lisette and their friendship, Rey creating vivid images of her subject’s youth and maturity, a life in which she brushed with the likes of Charles de Gaulle and Marilyn Monroe. But it is also a moving, deeply thoughtful meditation on youth, ageing and death, as Rey, as she ages herself, comes to a clearer understanding of what drove Lisette. The scenes in which Rey imagines her friend’s last hours are poignant, Lisette’s death depicted as a triumph. Impressively crafted.
A collection that reads like a cultural history.
Essays That Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to today
Ed., by Esther Anatolitis
MUP, $34.99
The phrase “cultural cringe”, from the 1950 essay by Arthur Phillips – part of this collection of Meanjin essays – has become part of everyday language. It perceptively locates a continuing cultural malaise, but read today, is also very much of its time too. The essays are diverse and strong, like Tony Birch’s trailblazing 1992 Nothing Has Changed, which examines the inherent racism in European place names. It’s unclear what Thea Astley’s 1968 grumbling about the shortcomings of the younger generation is doing here – perhaps to show that some things don’t change? On the other hand, it was a pleasure to read Manning Clark’s brilliantly excoriating response to the Whitlam sacking, likewise Amy McQuire’s plangent and disturbing study of the “disappearances” of Indigenous women and girls. In some ways, this reads like a cultural history.
Labor MP Andrew Leigh fears we will “sleep walk into a more unequal Australia”.
Battlers & Billionaires
Andrew Leigh
Black Inc, $29.99
Australia, Labor MP Andrew Leigh writes in this updated study of national inequality, has a deeply entrenched sense of egalitarianism. But, he argues both engagingly and clearly, it’s not reflected in our wealth distribution – a trend that set in with the early 1980s. Invoking an image invented by Dutch economist Jan Pen, Leigh asks us to imagine an hour-long human parade in which height signifies wealth: a parade of dwarves, until the final minutes in which giants hoarding obscene wealth appear. His fear is that “we will sleep walk into a more unequal Australia without realising what is being lost”. An alarming point, poignantly put. To stop the “social fabric” becoming so strained it divides the country and we lose the best us, he emphasises the importance of strong but fair economic growth, education, unions and community.
Two veteran cricket writers examine one of Australia’s cultural artefacts.
The Baggy Green
Michael Fahey and Mike Coward
Gelding Street Press, $34.99
The rise of the baggy green cap to iconic status in Australian cricket, like the “traditional” Boxing Day Test, is a recent phenomenon. Veteran cricket writers Fahey and Coward (with a contribution from Peter Sharpham) take us right
back to the beginning (especially tours of England in the 1880s) when there was no “baggy green”. These teams wore various colours, including those of the Melbourne Cricket Club. The cap as we know it today (green and gold, coat of arms and, yes, baggy) started to emerge only following Federation. Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor venerate the cap, and are largely responsible for it being raised to a level of religious significance. Richie Benaud, who basically played hatless throughout his career, said he couldn’t understand all the “kerfuffle”. Fun history and reading of a cultural artefact.