Books Roundup

Eating with My Mouth Open
Sam van Zweden (New South Books, available now)

Eating with My Mouth Open is our First Book Club pick for February—stay tuned to the KYD website and Podcast for more throughout the month!

In Eating with My Mouth Open, Sam van Zweden considers the cultural, personal and social value of food. Much like food itself, van Zweden’s writing is both personal and universal. She explores the discourse around food and bodies, working from a central memory or anecdote—a chocolate given to her as a child, visiting her chef father’s workplace and experiencing the wonder of a professional kitchen, or developing a penchant for collecting cookbooks.

The book also offers a view into the dark shadow that so often lurks behind food—diet culture. Van Zweden’s mother is a fat woman and a lifelong dieter, and is also a person living with a mental illness. Mother and daughter both have fraught relationships with their bodies, periodically attempting to shrink themselves using various guides. Van Zweden’s father and brother are chefs, and food is integral to their identities in a different way. As a member of a family that finds connection through food, van Zweden’s memories are situated around shared meals, passed-down recipes, scents and tastes.

There is a distinct need for books like this. Fitness influencers with no professional qualifications peddle nutritional guides and workout plans over the internet. Dieting is being rebranded under the term ‘clean eating’ and the counting of calories has given way to an obsession with macronutrients. During the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Butterfly Foundation—one of Australia’s leading eating disorder support services—has experienced a threefold increase in calls for support.

Readers who have suffered through the relentless, punishing cycle of diet culture will find an empathetic and non-judgemental voice.

Some of the most engaging parts of Eating with My Mouth Open are those that give insight into this world where foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Van Zweden writes about her personal relationship to diet culture eloquently and with gentleness towards herself. This is really quite a small portion of the book, but a powerful one. She writes of reconnecting with her body via trauma-informed yoga, and of replacing the shame attached to food and eating with more positive emotions. Readers who have suffered through the relentless, punishing cycle of diet culture will find an empathetic and non-judgemental voice in van Zweden.

This is a book that I know I will revisit many times, both for its important reflections on how humans relate to food, and for its warmth and wit. As well as being a book about food and the connections it fosters, this is a memoir about home, memory, body image, grief, and ultimately, healing.

– Ellen Cregan

Growing Up Disabled in Australia
ed. Carly Findlay (Black Inc., available now)

Growing Up Disabled in Australia is one of the handful of books I set aside to read during this strangely cool, wet, COVID-19 infected and fire-laden summer holidays. I thought an anthology would be ideal reading in between swims and naps, but it was difficult to put this one down. Editor Carly Findlay OAM, a writer, speaker and appearance activist, has selected a variety of artistic forms (essays, poems, letters, graphic art storytelling), and taken an intersectional approach to selecting authors. As a result, contributors are diverse in age, disabilities, gender identity, sexual orientation, cultural backgrounds, linguistic backgrounds, geographic experiences, and institutional, educational and employment experiences.

The forty-seven contributors share their unique stories with honesty and humour, giving readers an insight into their experiences of discrimination, stigma, marginalisation and abuse in everyday life, as well as the ways labels and assumptions have limited or held them back. As Kit Kavanagh-Ryan puts it in ‘Falling in Love, Fanfic, and Bone Fusion’: ‘My life is neither a miracle nor a tragedy, but I’ve been bruised by expectations.’ Importantly, themes of pride, empowerment and resilience reverberate throughout the anthology. ‘Don’t fear labels,’ says Anna Whateley in ‘Noisy Silence’, her tale of growing up without a formal diagnosis. ‘They can mean the difference between being voiceless on land or singing among an ocean chorus.’

The forty-seven contributors share their unique stories with honesty and humour… Pride, empowerment and resilience reverberate throughout the anthology.

These stories stayed with me long after reading them. One of the most memorable was ‘Free as a Bird’ by Yorta Yorta woman and disability advocate Jane Rosengrave. She gives her account of life in orphanages and foster homes as an Aboriginal girl with disability, experiencing verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Rosengrave writes:

To me, disability pride means powerful, strong, you’ve got a voice to be heard, you are not to be denied, you are to be accepted in the community… I’ve definitely found happiness now.

Growing Up Disabled in Australia is based on a social model that identifies disability as the ‘result of the interaction between those living with impairments and an environment filled with physical, attitudinal, communication and social barriers’. I was mindful that I was reading this anthology at a time when a number of people with disabilities have been ‘disproportionately negatively affected and more vulnerable to the pandemic’. As a person living without disability, this anthology reminded me of our responsibility to change the way we live and interact with each other in ways that are more inclusive. This change starts with us really listening to each other, and to the voices that too often go unheard.

– Christine Shamista

Born into This
Adam Thompson (UQP, available now)

Emerging Aboriginal (pakana) writer Adam Thompson knots together issues of identity, racism, colonialism and connection to land in his debut short story collection, Born into This. He welcomes readers to understand his characters through their internal conflict, using their everyday experiences as the subtext for structural and sinister real-world issues.

Each story stands alone and provides a different outlook on navigating life and law in so-called Tasmania. In the story ‘Summer Girl’, a woman uses white fragility in insidious ways towards her Aboriginal boyfriend, making reference to broader issues of white victimhood used as a tool to usurp Aboriginal people. In ‘Honey’, a beekeeper refuses to help his racist employer from a swarm. Thompson’s ability to interweave different perspectives through recurring symbols and themes (water, animals, family dynamics and power imbalances) sets him apart as a writer of consistency and tenacity.

The book relies on dialogue minimally; instead, Thompson leans on streams of character thoughts to progress each plot and develop intricate ties between personas and symbols. In ‘Aboriginal Alcatraz’, Thompson explores how one of his characters perceives the force of the ocean. In this story, the colour white symbolises danger, not safety, for First Nations people. One of the most poignant stories, ‘Descendent’, is about a teen with a once secure but now tenuous claim to a sacred space in her school. Her struggle speaks to broader issues of sovereignty and colonialism. As white students gain access to a space autonomous to Aboriginal students, the author alludes to how whiteness makes its claim on stolen land.

The book relies on dialogue minimally; instead, Thompson leans on streams of thought to develop intricate ties between personas and symbols.

Though literary fiction, the stories mirror those in the non-fiction anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. Thompson’s characters, diverse in age, gender and occupation, live complex and real lives, rooted in the landscape and society of the island and its surrounds. This collection of Indigenous resistance, triumph and joy stands alongside millions of stories throughout this country, first spoken, then written, since time immemorial. Thompson’s book holds no space for Australian settlers and colonisers to question their words.

– Raveena Grover 

Fake Accounts
Lauren Oyler (4th Estate, available now)

There are limits to writing non-fiction. It’s ill-advised to delight in falsehoods, for example, or openly embrace cognitive dissonance. But it’s fun and funny to copywrite autofiction in internet house style because everyone sounds the same.

Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, is copywritten in this voice. Or more specifically, that of a media or literary personality (typically a North American woman, middle-class, educated, with a Twitter following ‘in the mid four figures’). You know it when you see it: a heady mix of indecision hingeing on false balances; extreme self-scrutiny nurtured by the spectre of an infinite audience; oscillation between cynicism and self-abnegation couched by the anticipation of criticism; a veiled yet unyielding hunger for validation.

It starts with a scandal. The narrator, an unnamed blogger who works at a high-traffic women’s website (think Jezebel), looks through her normcore edgelord boyfriend Felix’s phone when she suspects he is cheating on her. What she discovers is worse—he’s cosplaying as a conspiracy theorist, layers of fake news and irony colliding on a popular Instagram account.

Two things happen next: Felix dies in a bike accident, and the narrator quits her job and relocates on a whim to Berlin, where they first met. And then nothing, except a series of minute existential crises and quasi-novel observations that come with living abroad, and things that transpire on a screen: search for recommendations, ask questions, chat, email, find dates, scroll. These take the tone of both melodrama and insignificance, speaking to the ‘extremely online’ experience—generally mundane yet always tempting surprise. She eventually indulges in her own web of deception, a bored experiment in which the bounds of characterisation are gamed. The book ends in a meta twist that further tests those limits.

Is it effective? It’s certainly affective. You could call it a book critic’s novel—pre-emptive and knowing, a simulation of twentieth-century Pynchonesque narratives that doubles as a swipe at the type of post-2010 writing that Oyler herself in an essay states ‘uses form as a tool for moral instruction’. But it also brings to mind what Sianne Ngai in Theory of the Gimmick describes as ‘overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).’

Is it effective? It’s certainly affective. Like that oft-parroted internet aphorism, ‘everything happens so much’, but nothing happens at all.

Still, it’s a remarkable effort in its multi-layeredness. With acute wit, Fake Accounts manages to actualise that online brand of pseudo-universality that arises from a limited specificity, a certain solipsism magnified tenfold when laundered through the social media feedback loop. It dissects the irreconciliable contradiction of self-mythologisation and self-determination that accompanies the idea of an ‘authentic’ identity on the internet suffused by the performance of real life. Like that oft-parroted internet aphorism, ‘everything happens so much’, but nothing happens at all.

– Cher Tan