Memoir

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.

In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members have not. I know for a fact that this is a question that plagues many people who grew up in similar circumstances to Burns, and it’s a question that I have posed and attempted to answer myself.

Leila carries a small bag but a lot of troubles.

When we meet at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre on unceded Gadigal land, the intention is to nurture a homely space so that people seeking asylum, especially women and their children can flourish in ways that are safe.

It is Friday afternoon. We gather every week to anchor this place in the practice of love, care and creativity.

These are our tools and they are all we have.

What a time to be reading about Annie Ernaux’s self-obliterating affair with S from the Soviet embassy in Paris, not that you’d sense that something’s in the air from the English-language reception to Getting Lost, Ernaux’s diary of the relationship, published in English last September. In the diary and in its generally admiring reviews S is described as a diplomat, apparatchik, attaché, ‘faithful servant of the USSR’ (Ernaux) and Brezhnev nostalgic/Stalin apologist when drunk. Also: ‘He is somewhat, not to say very, anti-Semitic: “Isn’t Mitterrand Jewish?” ’ Pretty standard stuff. Come on. He would have been KGB.

Rurality and mobility are polarities within registers of logic that animate the new worlds of both women. Our protagonist wishes to retain both in the hope of dwelling perpetually in her personal landscape of myths as she journeys through myriad worlds. 

Was my father a good artist? Did his work have value? These were never questions that arose.

There is a sub-genre of metafiction that presents to the reader the writer who can no longer write, but who, in the process of writing about his writer’s block, has written the book that you are reading.

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.

Even if Louis, by becoming an international best-selling author has ostensibly left his class background, he knows, as I do, that you never really leave.

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