Books Roundup

big beautiful female theory
Eloise Grills (Affirm Press, available now)

big beautiful female theory is our First Book Club pick for July—Join us on Instagram Live at 7pm AEST Wednesday 20 July for a live in-conversation event with the author and First Book Club host Ellen Cregan!

On page two of big beautiful female theory, Eloise Grills asks: ‘Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimised by body / positivity.’ This quote, reappropriated from the 2004 film Mean Girls, situates us immediately. We are here to think deeply, but also be entertained. 

Throughout the book, Grills pieces together the sinister origins of modern beauty standards from the western art canon through to snapchat filters. Her recollections of millennial teenage girlhood will be familiar to many readers who grew up in the 2000s. Grills dissects her teenage self, and this portion of the book has a sense of confession to it. She recalls: ‘When I was fourteen, someone told me that I was the second ugliest in my group of friends. Confirming my realest teenage fear: that I was grotesque, but also somehow unremarkable.’

But as well as memories of the sad, specific awkwardness of being a teenager, there is reflection. Grills writes about a close friend who was also a casual bully—giving nasty nicknames and acting with the sugary cruelty that seemed to dominate schoolyards in the mid-2000s. Grills asks her adult self ‘…does she look back at me as the villain of her childhood?’ This is a question that has also haunted me (and probably many others) into adulthood. Here, and in all the other essays in this book, there’s an intimacy to Grills’ writing that is impossible to escape. Her humour and wit is punctuated by sensual and occasionally grotesque metaphors and images—a polished stream-of-consciousness. Grills does this extremely well through just her words, but the graphic elements of the book are even more effective. The illustrations have a dreamlike quality, but figures and expressions are often exaggerated—cheesy grins, distorted body parts or proportions, and stylised re-imaginings of moments from pop culture appear throughout. In some essays, Grills also illustrates the faces of the writers she is quoting—a fresh spin on bibliography. 

A delightful ‘up yours’ to the stale, pale, maleness of how Western culture views and articulates the body.

Whether through self-portraiture or personal essay, big beautiful female theory is also concerned with the act of self-representation. In one essay, Grills observes:

I draw myself to replicate the

feeling of hovering inside/

outside myself

But there is more to this than just constructing a mirror. Grills wants to envision what the world could look like filled with the art of empowered and unstoppable ‘fat bitches’, and links the personal with the canon. In ‘The fat bitch in art’ she goes back through history to examine the tendency of the Western art luminaries to simultaneously punish and fetishise women for having bodies, or more specifically fat bodies. Grills wonders, ‘Why did [Peter Paul] Rubens paint fat chicks anyway? Maybe Rubens was jealous he didn’t have big cans. I would be jealous, too, but then, I have big cans’, once again revolting against the status quo in a way that makes readers cackle. In imagining a gallery she calls ‘The Museum of Fat Bitches’ Art’, Grills conjures an inverted world that celebrates the artists that actually inhabit these bodies, over the likes of Rubens.

In its structure, subject matter and—probably most importantly—its attitude, this book is a delightful ‘up yours’ to the stale, pale, maleness of how Western culture views and articulates the body in written and visual art. This is nonfiction at its very best: captivating and exciting.

– Ellen Cregan

Enclave
Claire G. Coleman (Hachette Australia, available now)

Dante has nine levels of hell, but in Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave there are three: the literal, the emotional and the structural divisions in the text itself that keep the protagonist Chris trapped in Safetown, a supposed haven from the chaos of the world. That is, until she kisses a girl and for her ‘crime’ is tortured and thrown out. It is this premise, steeped in the dystopia genre, that Coleman uses to explore how oppression and control, fuelled by racism, homophobia and transphobia, can happen.

Safetown is a giant living-dead thing, described as ‘a polished serpentine.’ This lifeless setting is echoed in the surgically altered faces of the people. Chris’ mother and her friends are as matching and plastic as the buildings. Chris too is meant to die, in a way, by fully embracing the artificial. She’s pushed towards it by the people of the city, and the city itself, which has a program called Safetynet that tells her where to go, what to wear and feeds her stories of the dangers beyond the enclave. Coleman reveals that control does not have to be forceful but passive if people keep the dystopia alive in each other and the world around them.

Coleman reveals that control does not have to be forceful but passive if people keep the dystopia alive in each other.

The story unfolds to show us that it’s not just the physical world, but the imaginative barriers in Chris’ mind that make her a citizen of Safetown. Places beyond the Wall trigger her, and her prejudices keep her from seeking help. People with brown skin are ‘the colour of servants’ and every tattooed person is a criminal. Coleman shows us the insidiousness of the status quo via Chris, who unpacks her ideas and unhealthy attachment to Safetown with all the deft of a child peeling an apple: messy, awkward and sometimes with no real progress made. There is a realism in this. We can leave the physical cause of our prejudices, but it takes work to unpick them from our minds.

In the novel itself, the chapters act as walls. The headings alternate between days, numbers and small snapshots of the world. The latter gives the reader the point-of-view of a drone. As the book progresses, Coleman uses these sections to expand the readers view of the world as Chris’ own knowledge of the world broadens. The effect is that the book becomes a sort of chameleon: changing shape and form as truths are revealed.

Enclave offers up questions: how close is our society to this? Do versions of Safetown exist in the real world? And what really is a utopia on stolen and colonized lands? The book holds up a thoughtful mirror showing us to ourselves using an all too real future. Hell, it turns out, can be everywhere.

– Alexander Te Pohe

Holy Woman
Louise Omer (Scribe, available now)

Holy Woman is an ambitious debut from Adelaide-based Louise Omer. Charting her evolution from church-attending teen to the aftermath of her divorce from both her husband and the Pentecostal Christian Church, Omer combines travel writing, feminist theology and confessional memoir to interrogate her place as a woman within patriarchal organized religion. It is the book’s blend of these different methods of enquiry that ultimately betray the aspirations of its concept.

Holy Woman expands into complex territories whose borders rub up against each other uncomfortably.

After the dissolution of her marriage, Omer embarks on a global journey exploring a variety of cultures and faiths. While there is some moving memoir in Holy Woman’s pages, the closest Omer comes to revelations are within her travels. While in the Czech Republic, a queer Jewish professor that Omer interviews states:

‘There’s a sense of both/and: yes, this practice is rooted in ideas that are problematic, but —’ Ivy looked into my eyes. ‘It’s also a practice that helps me connect to God.’

The question of why people choose religion may forever remain unanswerable. Perhaps a thorn in the side of Holy Woman was Omer’s attempt to ascribe a single answer to her question, to find a sole criminal on which to blame the pain and rage she felt at her de-conversion. But to name her killer patriarchy, to name it a male god, reduces the interesting, nuanced possibilities of her life’s confessions, and a global exploration of Christianity’s failings.

As memoir, Omer’s search and reflections are her own. But in combining her confessions with travelogue and feminism across multiple religions, Holy Woman expands into complex territories whose borders rub up against each other uncomfortably. In her travels through global organised religions she encounters sexual abuse, homophobia and institutional corruption. However, she bypasses these in pursuit of a symbolic female figure, with the quest to embrace the beauty of her own vulva a core goal of her search. There are uneasy contradictions in this quest for a divine feminine—despite Omer’s documented history as a feminist pre- and post-conversion, she consistently describes women she meets in ungenerous ways, and avoids consideration of the privilege of travel as a middle-class white woman, with references to her parents funding of the trip, disregard for other travellers and a seeming lack of interest for her surroundings.

While Omer will, I imagine, find an audience in post-faith women who can empathise with her journey, those of us wanting a deeper understanding of our relationship to faith will struggle to find answers beyond the Omer-coined ‘vulva gazing’.

– Rebecca Varcoe

Forty Nights
Pirooz Jafari (Ultimo Books, available now)

In the novel Forty Nights, Tishtar’s diary-like accounts of his Melbourne life and legal practice read intimately and pour with compassion. A warm storyteller, debut author Pirooz Jafari follows Tishtar as he takes on a legal case for Habiba, who is helping her orphan nieces migrate to Australia from war-torn Somalia. This contemporary story works well to harmonise with the protagonist’s rumination about his past, with the politics of Iran in the eighties and with the common grief of countless migrant stories. This is where Forty Nights excels.

Jafari has written an impressive book. The stories are emotionally and politically complex and need to be told.

This novel carries significant stories. Ones of romance, inhuman politics, war, family, friendship. The relationships between Tishtar and his mamar and madar are a heartfelt through-line bringing universality to Tishtar’s experiences—family ties are a strong theme of the book. The harsh politics of the Khomeini regime in Iran during the Islamic Revolution are brought to life though detailed anecdotes and striking imagery—from an adolescent girl seeing her friend’s birthday party be bombed before her eyes, to the enduring light of the poetry of Hafez. The moments of beauty come from a well-rooted love of the culture and country of Iran, which is nurtured by Tishtar’s mother:

‘Argh, Shakespeare! Walk your own soil before you venture elsewhere.’

‘Meaning’ I said, scooping up the last mouthful of bastani.

‘You should have looked to Persian literature. You should embrace your own heritage.’

The theme of doomed romance is where the novel tends to lose its thread. There is no narrative link between the spiralling love story of Tishtar and Gretel, the ghost of a woman from fourteenth-century Visby. Gretel is introduced as a spectre, an ephemeral, mysterious entity. Her connection to Tishtar remains unexplained. Without a stronger narrative foundation, it is difficult to empathise with Tishtar’s monomaniacal quest to love and understand Gretel. In trying to bind the already tragic, magical and beautiful stories of Tishtar and the migrant families surrounding him with an ungrounded romance with an imagined figure, the novel falters and can make the stories based in life lose traction.

Jafari has written an impressive book with large scope. The stories contained are emotionally and politically complex and need to be told. As a rendering of real-world events and a modern reflection on Australian migrant culture, Forty Nights is an enduring story on the cusp of a revelatory beauty.

– Anith Mukherjee