Memoir

Driving was something that was for other people, a way of interfacing easily with the world that I would always lack. 

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and necessary to build your identity using what you see around you, but this work is collaborative rather than transactional or instructional.

Hard Joy widens the lens, looking back across the span of seventy years to consider those fundamental human questions of what makes us, and who makes us.

Your story is one of defiance and ongoing resistance, Ronnie. Every day you drew breath as a Black woman wearing a blue uniform you were resisting. You may have been required to walk in that world, but your bare Black feet never left our world.

While the reader can sympathise with West’s reluctance to impose his own ideas on the prisoners, where does this leave the debate around prison abolition and reform? And what validity, one is tempted to ask, do reform and abolition movements have if their agendas are not co-opted by those most affected?

‘The neighbourhood, as I have started to record it, has started to fade into nostalgia.’

‘This idea of difference, reinforcing difference through representation, and how this relates to social power, is what I want to use this book as an opportunity to think more about.’

We need stories like Borderline to help us see the devastating psychological effects that the growing rates of incarceration will inevitably have on yet another generation of young people.

But Things I Learned at Art School isn’t ‘merely’ funny (merely funny?). Like the figure of the mermaid, which makes numerous appearances in Dunn’s memoir, it is hybrid.

What Dux wants to know is this: Is there a Catholic shared identity that continues in those who are lapsed? And if so, what should she do about it?