The Broken Places
Russell Franklin, Phoenix, $32.99

It can’t have been easy for Gregory Hemingway, who transitioned to become Gloria Hemingway and died in 2001. The third child of Ernest Hemingway was transgender, and at first blush it might seem the worst possible luck to be born to a self-destructive literary legend (and alcoholic) whose work became so identified with rugged masculinity. It’s more complicated than that, of course. Hemingway senior came to be imprisoned by his gender. His friend Gertrude Stein opined that he played to hypermasculine fantasy because he was sensitive and ashamed to admit he was, and the posthumous novel The Garden of Eden explores androgyny endlessly. Here, Gregory encounters the confinements of gender through lived experience, and the shadow of the father looms, for better or worse, until Gloria finds the light. An illuminating, if sometimes mawkish, biographical novel that will lure those intrigued by the intersection of literary and trans histories.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Obsession
Nicole Madigan, Pantera Press, $34.99

Reading this account of a relentless three-year experience of stalking is like being immersed in someone else’s deeply disturbing living nightmare.

When journalist Nicole Madigan’s marriage ended in divorce, she met another man and happiness beckoned. But a chance meeting led to seemingly harmless texts, then on to full-blown on-line abuse: invasive, tatty and violent. The perpetrator was a woman her new partner had had a brief relationship with, and she was determined to destroy Madigan’s new life. There is detachment in the way it’s related, but dramatic immediacy as well in registering the effect on her, her partner (who was a staunch support), their children and family. A mix of memoir and analysis, Madigan also examines related concepts such as obsessive love, the psychology of stalking and its wider effects.

Prudish Nation
Paul Dalgarno, Upswell, $29.99

The question of whether we are a prudish nation is largely examined here through the prism of non-monogamy. But Dalgarno, a polyamorist, casts his net far wider than that. He interviewed more than 30 writers with varying shades of sexuality and the result is a kind of snapshot of unconventional sex lives today and his interviewees’ search for a place in what Dennis Altman calls “a couple culture”. To the question are we still prudes, Patrick Mullins says, “Yea, definitely”, while Lee Kofman is more positive. Whatever the orientation, experiences of society’s responses to their choices differ widely. As in the choice of what might be called labels, Altman preferring “queer” to LGBTQIA+, a mouthful, he says, for SBS presenters. Woven into this is Dalgarno’s poly life. The nation might be, but there’s nothing prudish about this book.

On the Ashes
Gideon Haigh, Allen & Unwin, $34.99

As a cricket writer Gideon Haigh has few peers, past or present. This cameo history of the Ashes (drawn from years of writing) confirms his standing as a class act. Apart from his ability to hit on the right image or wry turn of phrase, like C.L.R. James he contextualises the game historically and culturally, as in the sad obscure case of Australian captain Harry Trott, who went from victorious skipper to Kew asylum inmate, where he stared indifferently at the institution’s oval. So often the Ashes transcends mere cricket and this collective portrait contemplates the rivalry in its many phases, with a gallery of heroes and villains to match, from Harold Larwood, in narrative terms the necessary “anti-Bradman”, to Ian Botham’s Headingley feats and that ball by Shane Warne. A book timed perfectly for the resumption of hostilities.

Pandemedia: How COVID Changed Journalism
Eds., Tracey Kirkland & Gavin Fang, Monash University Publishing, $34.99

If the pandemic, after decades of neoliberalism, thrust governments back into the public spotlight, it also had the same effect for the media. The news had never seemed so central to peoples’ lives.

But, as these essays and observations by journalists and presenters show, it was a testing time for the media as well, who in many ways were flying the plane as they were building it. As much as the mainstream media shot to the fore, COVID also fostered online misinformation. How does the mainstream respond to that, while, as the editors say, “sustaining a respectful discussion of ideas?” And what of presenting the “truth” at the risk of public panic? Not to mention hostility to journalists or the politicising of government measures based on the advice of experts, who too were thrust into the spotlight. A circumspect and varied examination of the recent surreal past.

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