Gender and sexuality

Women are sometimes portrayed in traditional domestic settings in Leunig’s drawings, but they are never confined to simple human giver roles, or if they are, they chafe against these power dynamics, consciously or unconsciously.

I always wonder whether I have fused fragments of several memories together to create my own narrative. Did my mother or I displace significant details?

People often don’t realise my being non-binary means they need to do some work. You can acknowledge my queerness by shaking my partner’s hand but you have to actually change language to get the trans thing right.

My faith and culture were still paramount to my identity – but so was my femininity. I grappled with my desire for equality and my quest to assert myself.

What came first: the projection of women’s qualities (wiliness, treachery, dependency) onto translation, or the projection of translation’s qualities (submissiveness, restraint, inferiority) onto women?

Hill’s book is essential, if not easy reading. She also answers the question which will be in most people’s minds as they read this book: what is to be done?

Because of its locations, its desires, and its literary influences, this is a novel that creaks with the weight of familiarity; this is not a fault.

It’s strange to think about it now, but when I first embraced knitting in public, my friends and family struggled with the idea that I might want to knit somewhere other than within the confines of my home.

I go to memoir because there, someone understands what this is like, to be smaller and more fragile and vulnerable to those ‘large, heavy bodies spilling out of doorways’, to ‘feel the micro-aggressions as macro’ (Atkinson), to grow up in a world where even your own father says things like ‘Good day—for a rape’ (Lilley) to old ladies, even though he doesn’t mean you, of course not you, love.

‘Across all its sectors, book culture remains a game that is stacked against women.’