Non-fiction

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 a review of Frances Peters-Little’s new biography, musician and historian Toby Martin follows the exemplary career of Jimmy Little, whose life and work attest to popular music’s power to shift cultural and political attitudes.

In a review of John Kean’s study of the Papunya Tula art movement, Martin Edmond examines the intricate negotiations between aesthetic intention and ritual restriction that made the artists’ work possible.

In her review of Hayley Singer’s collection of essays, Anwen Crawford anatomises the abattoir – from its paradoxes of visibility to its banalisation of life and death – as a subject for literature.

Iana Robitaille reviews three books which ‘provide historical context for some of neoliberalism’s most persistent idioms: grit, resilience, initiative, innovation, positive mindset, and self-improvement’.

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.