AustLit

'Early in The Girls, Chloe Higgins recounts her ­father’s reaction when he learns his two other children were killed in the car accident that has put him in hospital. “It is almost cartoonish, the way his mouth spreads open and his eyes push together, his forehead scrunching in on itself … ” Higgins writes of Maurice, who was driving the family car when it swerved into oncoming traffic and burst into flames, daughters Carlie and Lisa still trapped inside.' (Introduction)

'How do we talk about grief? Chloe Higgins’s memoir reveals her response to the loss of her sisters, and the impact of that loss on her parents. ' 

'The title of Chloe Higgins’ debut memoir is shorthand for her two younger sisters, victims of a fatal car accident when the author is aged seventeen. Her family avoids using their individual names, explains Higgins, so that ‘they are separate from us, an abstract thing on which we need not hang our pain’. In her frank depictions of drug use, sex work, mental illness, and her fraught relationship with her bereaved mother, Higgins might be described as unflinching in her approach. But the telling of this story is equally characterised by a flinching: from the memory of her sisters; from her own pain.' (Introduction) 

'Brittany Higgins has signed a book deal with Penguin Random House Australia. Not just any book — a memoir.'