Health and bodies

In recent years the autism memoir has been a success story of Australian publishing. In this review of Clara Törnvall’s The Autists, writer and researcher Caitlin McGregor identifies the ways that the conventions of the genre may be selling autistic writers and their readers short.

For me birth was illustrative of how becoming parents pegs you to a whole new set of heterosexual gender expectations: there I was, the new mother, left alone to cope through pain and fear; my partner, the father, sent to another room with no information; us now understood to be husband and wife.

These books, mostly hybrids of personal essay, reportage and autofiction, if read chronologically, become a metanarrative of his quest to offer an unvarnished vision of a complex human, a modern-day naked Rousseau, inspired by the inward gaze of Montaigne.

Is Garbes’s unifying vision enough to confront what we are up against? Or is radical motherhood only the first stop on the road to mass politics for collective justice?

The rush to push out COVID literature and thinkpieces is troubling, if only because surely the pandemic has taught us the value of slowing down, of being wary of endless production in all its forms. Surely, the pandemic should have taught us, if nothing else, to take time, if we are privileged enough to be able to do so. Yet I write this knowing about the economic necessity to write – this review is also, in a literal sense, born out of economic necessity.

In the years to come, we may look back on 2021 as the beginning of rugby league’s reckoning with violence and its attendant trauma. In Plum, Cowell has written a book for this cultural moment, addressing the hidden cost of the hyper-masculine culture that sustains rugby league.

When we swim we become part of something larger, our bodies part of the tidal flow and movement of water, the great pulse of the planet’s systems, the act of giving ourselves over to the water a form of communion, of embodied connectedness.

The First Time I Thought I Was Dying is at its most engaging when Walker lets her specific experiences raise larger, ethically knotty questions and resists the urge to answer them too neatly.

How do writers like Maguire integrate scientific details and ideas into their books so that the reader’s experience is smooth and unimpeded? And why is it important that they do?

Ghosts, which takes the form of a video essay-poem, takes the binary bomb gender reveal as a point of departure.