In search of lost links in a family history
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By Declan Fry
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Krissy Kneen
Text, $34.99
Human history is a vast compendium of accounts concerning a certain storied and life-changing trip. Call it One Weird Trick to Discover Yourself: origin stories, heroâs journeys, odysseys, passages from innocence to experience.
In Japan, the story of âUrashima Taroâ tells of a young man who leaves his community; upon returning, everyone and everything he knows has gone (and perhaps there is a warning here about the dangers of leaving the community). In the white American story, the individual makes themselves anew, sloughing off tradition and taboo to become a kind of song of themselves, the Whitmanesque inhabitant of a private-yet-eagerly-universalising world in which âevery atom belonging to me as good belongs to youâ.
Morning mail: Labor pledges $10bn for social housing, street clashes in Israel, TV pet peeves
Labor leader Anthony Albanese uses his budget reply speech to promise a $10bn affordable housing fund. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
Friday: Anthony Albanese promises 20,000 new properties in his federal budget reply. Plus: two dead on Mount Everest
Thu 13 May 2021 16.49 EDT
Good morning. It’s Friday 14 May and ,while
budget week might be over, the analysis is just beginning. The
sexual harassment conversation shows no signs of slowing in Australia’s halls of power. And violence continues to escalate in
Gaza. This is Imogen Dewey with this morning’s main stories.
The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen by Krissy Kneen review – memoir as both fairytale and defiant truth Bec Kavanagh
In the centre of a page without adornment, before the opening chapter of the book, a small paragraph might almost be overlooked: “When I was a child my family won the lotto and used the money to move to the middle of nowhere in central Queensland to make fairytale characters of papier-mâché.” It would be an outlandish set-up even for a work of fiction, let alone a memoir, but this small incredible opening is a speck compared to the extraordinary story that unfolds.
In her 2009 memoir
Affection, Krissy Kneen recounted her cloistered upbringing, first in Blacktown, New South Wales, then in Bororen, Queensland, where her family ran a tourist attraction called Dragonhall. As a child, she experienced a deeply sensuous inner life marked by an intense sexual precocity. As an adult, she retains a predilection for crushes on strangers: there is her bookshop colleague Christopher and then his friend, Paul. When Kneen unexpectedly spends an evening exchanging messages with Paul via Facebook, she knows what is coming: “[a]lready, right up front, he feels like family to me.”
Kneen’s second memoir,
The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, traces the lineage of this desire for kinship and belonging. “I know I am compensating”, she writes, “for the emptiness I feel when I am with my own maternal family.” Rather than imparting a firm sense of identity, the extreme closeness of the household in which Kneen was raised – she lived with her mother, au
The 11 Australian books everyone should read now
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April 23, 2021 7.23pm
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From an Australian classic by Peter Carey to an urgent call to arms on domestic violence, these are the books our authors are turning to right now.
Melissa Lucashenko recommends
Credit:Renee Nowytarger
My favourite fiction of 2021 is a compelling short story collection from Tasmanian Pakana man Adam Thompson. When I encountered him at a First Nations Writing conference in Canberra in 2018, I felt like I was meeting a long-lost writerly brother. I was attracted by his vision for sculpting his Country in story, and his seriousness about that project. When