Falling Is Like Flying

Falling is Like Flying is Manon Uphoff’s autobiographical exploration of the traumatic sexual abuse experienced at the hands of her tyrannical father. With a courageous and extraordinary story to share, Uphoff returns to the dark labyrinth of her childhood to ‘catch sight of what I was there: the final doll in the matryoshka. The doll you can’t open.’ Despite her initial reticence, the recollections gather momentum as she relentlessly relives the trauma endured within a family that was both ordinary and deeply disturbed.

The Mahogany Pod

Jill Hopper(Saraband Books, 2021); hbk, 2021) Billed as a memoir of beginnings and endings this is the first book by Jill Hopper, a London based freelance journalist. It joins the growing number of personal accounts of loss and grief such as Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, or Megan O’ Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. Collectively Read More

WATERMARKS

Lenka Janiurek’s compelling memoir, Watermarks, ebbs and flows through a life shaped by trauma and loss. Beginning with her own birth, ‘I am in water, submerged and suspended’, Janiurek floods the text with densely detailed descriptions of a turbulent life. At six years old, the loss of her mother changes ‘absolutely everything and everyone for Read More

In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, an inventive mining of the darker side of folk and fairy tales, was hailed in 2018 as one of 15 books by women ‘shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.’ Her memoir, In the Dream House, offers Read More

Motherwell: A Girlhood

Motherwell is a poignant family portrait, articulately painted by the late Deborah Orr of a life with ‘house-proud’ mother Win and ‘factory-worker’ father John. Orr achieved success as a journalist, becoming editor of the Guardian’s Weekend supplement by 31, and writing a weekly column for two decades thereafter. She was also a child of Scottish Read More

Against Memoir

Michelle Tea’s latest book, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions and Criticisms, turns the notion of the memoir on its head. Divided into three sections – ‘Art & Music’, ‘Love & Queerness’ and ‘Writing & Life’ – the essay collection paints a non-sequential picture of Tea’s life, layered under her musings and rants about other LGBT+ artists Read More

WORDS AND STITCHES: A CONVERSATION WITH CLARE HUNTER

Sunshine streams in through the huge windows of Perth Concert Hall where Clare Hunter and I meet to talk about her book, Threads of Life, a History of the World through the Eye of a Needle. Recently published, this is a history of the social impact and political meaning of textiles. Armed with coffee and Read More

Threads of Life

Do you ever read the last page of a book first? I don’t know why I did with this book, because I wouldn’t usually. Yet I am so glad I did. I know nothing about needlework but this is how the final paragraph begins, ‘Sewing is a way to mark our existence on cloth: patterning Read More

‘Colours’: A lyric memoir-essay by Rebecca Arthur

  If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. (Virginia Woolf) [1]                   Blue I can paint my earliest memory in blue – my memory of the jam jar I dropped at my parents’ feet after being so certain I Read More