Oliver Reeson

In her presentation of Anja, Howell has fallen into a contemporary trap, which is to presume that in modern literature a woman losing it is inherently understandable. That to shoulder a great emotional burden makes a female character three-dimensional and complex. Rather, Anja who apparently has always operated on a self-sufficient basis, continues over the course of this book to isolate herself and to consider herself set apart from the world.

I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.

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.

There is this often-quoted adage about internet comment sections, probably you’ve heard it. It’s called Godwin’s Law and it predicts…

‘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.’

In Jennifer Mills’ The Airways, we travel through a series of bodies. The we here is us, the readers, but we share this journey with something else too – a ghost, a consciousness, something that speaks and thinks and feels but isn’t necessarily a body. It is something that will call into question the way we think about bodies.

I quite often like, or at least find satisfaction in being bullied, vilified, and made uncomfortable by a book. I have a life!