Non-fiction

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.

In the blurb-saturated present, authors can decry blurbs as corrupt and silly all they like. When they publish new books, however, they will still be obliged to solicit blurbs, and most will provide them for friends and colleagues on request.

Reading Diagnosis Normal now, I find Jane’s sense-making of being a young woman – particularly a clever, literate, ambitious and feminist young woman – in that supposedly liberated but actually pretty sexist decade is useful to my own ongoing project of self-forgiveness, and of grasping the bigger picture. In many ways they are the same thing. We had riot grrl feminism, Bikini Kill and L7 and Hole, but there was also the public shaming of Monica Lewinsky and a pervasive atmosphere of misogyny.

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

On a long drive once, in a hot summer, on a stretch of the Hume where rolling, sheep-ravaged hills the colour of bone gave glimpses of a long train full of wheat, my father-in-law explained train wheels to me: how they ran, how they turned, how they stayed on the tracks. The rim on the wheel, he said, was less important than its shape.

These are the suburbs, the world we actually live in: the local beach or park, the corner shop, the servo, the pub, the bus seat in a street. The interiors of the fibro houses, those cupboards, wallpaper, furnishings, the venetian blinds, bedspreads, décor, ‘that vase’, are objects and spaces we know.

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.

The Bankstown Biennale is ‘making locality’ by bringing together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists from across the country whose practice is often in conversation with homelands elsewhere.

Why has it taken me so long to write this review of The Most Important Job in the World? Whenever I…

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?