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Posts tagged nonfiction
See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill

Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:

‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’

Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …

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The Undying: A meditation on modern illness by Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?

That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.

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