AustLit

'Liz Byrski’s introduction to Women of a Certain Rage is, among other things, a homage to second-wave feminism and a lament that feminism, ‘originally a radical countercultural movement’, has been ‘distorted into a tool of neoliberalism’. While there is no doubt that strains of feminism have been co-opted by neoliberalism to debilitating effect, this narrative – that feminism has become ineffectual since the 1970s – is one that erases many contemporary feminisms, as well as broader feminism-informed political movements and the work that they have done and continue to do.' (Introduction)

 (Introduction)

'The writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page.' (Introduction)

''Seize the day' really fucked me up as a rule of thumb, growing up. My parents were strict when I was a teenager and whenever I was let out of the house for anything social, I would seize 'life' in a panic, not sure when my next chance would be. Carpe party, carpe sex, carpe Sambuca. As a fifteen-year-old I was having too much sex that felt like pain or like nothing; I was crying behind sheds at twenty-firsts and passing out under tables. When I had to stay home, which was often, FOMO made me feel physically sick. I felt like life was always happening without me.' (Publication abstract)