Books Roundup

How to Be Between
Bastian Fox Phelan (Giramondo, available now)

How to Be Between is our First Book Club pick for May—Stay tuned for features on our website and podcast throughout the month!

After puberty, Bastian Fox Phelan started to grow thick hair all over their body, including a moustache and a beard. As a person who had been assigned female at birth, the hair was a surprise. Phelan and their mother attempted plucking, waxing and even laser hair removal, but none of these painful and costly attempts at removal proved to be permanent. They were eventually diagnosed with PCOS, a hormonal condition that can cause ‘excessive’ hair growth in AFAB people. As Phelan grew older and realised their queer identity, they became a a student of gender studies and grew out their facial hair. They also spent time considering what ‘excessive’ even meant. How to Be Between is a memoir of living beyond labels in this body that visibly defies gender binary.

Phelan’s comfort with their facial hair creeps up on them in their twenties: ‘Looking at my reflection, I knew it made no sense. My beard was ugly-beautiful. I wanted it, and I had no choice. My extraordinary form, enlarged in the mirror.’ After an adolescence and young adulthood spent considering their hair from an almost-academic viewpoint—making zines, studying gender, and partaking in many discussions about queerness and sex traits—they are able to embrace their appearance, albeit with the feeling that there is no other way. One of the greatest lessons from How to Be Between is that trans existence is not about a linear transition between two distinct states. Phelan’s identity shifts and changes throughout their life, and so much of this book is concerned with the experience of self-discovery through study.

One of the greatest lessons from How to Be Between is that trans existence is not about a linear transition between two distinct states.

Phelan also gives their reader a glimpse into the politics of left-wing queer spaces. They join a queer collective, which begins with a ‘label-free picnic’ and ends with hundreds of email-chain arguments over representation and appropriation that send Phelan into a period of acute anxiety. Phelan reflects that the ‘collective seemed like it was built on something solid, but at the slightest pressure it was falling apart.’ In the midst of this drama, Phelan attends Mardi Gras for the first time. They recall ‘… a rainbow flag was painted on the road. I’d learned to sneer at the flag—these days, it seemed more like an emblem of gay assimilation. But the sight of it taking up the road made my heart flutter. I was proud—I loved that flag. I would kneel down and kiss it.’ This is a grounding moment—both for Phelan and for the book—that elegantly captures their maturing view of queerness. They are not bitter or dismissive about the failures of the collective, but are simply allowing themself to celebrate that broader idea of queer resistance. While the in-fighting is a small part of Phelan’s story, their assessment of the conflict is gentle but incisive, and for this reason I would have liked to hear more of their perspective on this point.

As this is a book concerned with identity in an abstract sense, rather than specific events, it has a meandering pace. However, it’s fitting—Phelan is a passionate and charming writer and their prose is so enjoyable to read and savour. This is not the kind of memoir written by a marginalised person to gently educate others. Instead, How to Be Between is a beautiful account of finding joy through gender expression, art and building community.

— Ellen Cregan

Root & Branch
Eda Gunaydin (NewSouth Publishing, available now)

I am, always, excited to read Eda Gunaydin’s essays. They’re brilliant: sharply observed and intimate, drenched in the awkward, ugly, banal and beautiful materiality of the everyday. Frequently, they are also shot through with a dry humour that can be both sharply intelligent and unapologetically silly (and sometimes both at once). Her work has appeared in the likes of Liminal, Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books and The Lifted Brow, and readers have lapped it up, I among them. Now, many of these essays and a number of new ones have been collected in her debut book, Root & Branch.

The collection contains twelve essays that broadly consider class, intergenerational trauma, diaspora and identity (among other themes), and which do so from what Rosi Braidotti would describe as an ‘embedded and embodied position.’ Gunaydin is fiercely present in her work, which is born, she makes no bones about it, out of her particular positionality. This is more than identity politics or representation, but an ethical impulse towards responsibility. It is, perhaps, an aesthetic drive toward an unfinished memoir Gunaydin admits that she is writing/not writing. It is also an affective pedagogic tool, wherein theory is reconstituted through personal narrative and in the process, given weight and depth—given feeling.

These are personal essays, wildly so, and they are clever and unexpected—and highly readable, too.

Which is not to say that the collection is heavily invested in theory, per se. Some essays certainly dive more fully into it than others, for example ‘The Gothic Body’, which contains long quotes from Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Kelly Hurley. Although, even here, Gunaydin does not linger on analysis, but rather sets the quotes up in juxtaposition to her own anecdotes and observations. Others—‘Tell-All’ or ‘Doğduğun Yer, Doyduğun Yer’, for example—balance the personal with the theoretical in favour of the former, but always understanding that the two are inextricable, the latter informing the world view through which the personal is made legible. Yet some, like ‘Only So Much’ veer so closely to the personal that they read almost like short story.

Gunaydin returns over and over to Turkey—both the one overseas and the various ideas of Turkey that make up the diaspora—and to her mother, a figure with whom she has a difficult and frequently unhealthy relationship. Many essays start in one place (the inequality between Western Sydney and the Eastern suburbs, the theorist Lacan, a local kebab shop), and unspool in all directions, growing thick with anecdotes and the gristle of living. In parsing her subject matter, Gunaydin is also parsing herself, and allowing the reader close enough to watch. These are personal essays, wildly so, and they are clever and unexpected—and highly readable, too.

— Dženana Vucic

Daisy & Woolf
Michelle Cahill (Hachette Australia, available now)

Daisy and Woolf, the debut novel by the poet and writer Michelle Cahill, is an arresting, layered work that interrogates the multiplicities of experience, the nature of power and the ethics of art. The novel depicts the life of Mina, an Australian writer of Anglo Indian heritage, in a dual narrative with her fictional interpretation of Daisy, a Eurasian character from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea famously does with Jane Eyre, Daisy and Woolf explores ‘the other side’ of a racialised character in English literature. Cahill’s Mina is committed to bringing Daisy—referred to as the ‘dark, adorable’ Daisy in Woolf’s novel—and her Anglo Indian heritage to a fuller life.

An arresting, layered work that interrogates the multiplicities of experience, the nature of power and the ethics of art.

The novel is suffused with poetic imagery and a striking sense of place. In southern France ‘sorrow is as delicate as the wildflowers, the phlox and the dandelion’; in Venice there is a ‘baptism in art, in light…Watery rhythms mesmerise the soul, the horizon is opaline.’ In spanning the globe, Daisy and Woolf connects disparate forms of colonial oppression to write back not only to Virginia Woolf, but also to empire and its lingering effects.

One of the gifts of Cahill’s novel is its ability to link broader structural and societal injustices with her characters. Through the interwoven lives of Daisy and Mina, the novel elucidates how the injustices of the past still shape the present. As in Mrs Dalloway, where the shadow of World War I lingers over 1920s London, the idyllic façade of the twenty-first century city is also troubled. In an early scene, Mina walks through St James’ Park, imagining the area in summer with ‘garden beds blooming with yellow, red, and burgundy tulips’, unaware that the very next day ‘Khalid Masood would drive a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge.’ The novel hints at the violent legacy of empire and its continued consequences for individual human lives in the form of geopolitical upheavals like Brexit and terrorism.

In addition to these themes, Cahill also examines gender and creativity, as Woolf does in A Room of One’s Own. The novel unpacks the artistic pressures caused by societal constructs around the idea of ‘woman’: mother, daughter, sister, wife, lover, victim. Unlike Woolf, Cahill’s novel explores the interiority of racialised women, particularly those of mixed race. Both Mina and Daisy’s stories depict the precarity of women on the fringes of established categories and structures. In this way, the novel functions as a postcolonial text that challenges representations of women of colour, as well as an intersectional feminist exploration of how the personal is political. As Mina’s Daisy reflects, ‘there is no shortage of imagined histories and past lives imposed on the likes of the dark, immigrant stranger.’

Daisy and Woolf is radical, poetic and reflective. Infused with an undercurrent of grief and loss—the loss of relationships, homelands and diasporic traditions—the novel is also a work of resilience, solidarity, and the creation of new and chosen identities.

— Lyn Dickens

Abomination
Ashley Goldberg (Penguin Random House Australia, available now)

It’s 1999, and afternoon classes at Melbourne’s Yahel Academy are cancelled. It’s soon clear why: a long-standing teacher at the ultra-Orthodox Jewish school, Rabbi Joel Hirsch, has sexually abused several of its students. On discovering the abuse, the school has helped him to evade secular justice by fleeing the country to Israel. For friends Yonatan and Ezra, who are pupils at Yahel, that day marks the beginning of the end of their childhood friendship. Two decades later, the two unexpectedly reconnect at a protest calling for Hirsch’s extradition to Australia.

Abomination is not only, or even primarily, a novel about sexual abuse and its victims’ fight for justice. Rather, the story of Hirsch provides context to a closely observed, insightful character study of two young Jewish men in contemporary Melbourne. When they meet as adults, Yonatan remains an ultra-Orthodox Jew and is a teacher at Yahel. He is married and expecting his first child. For him ‘a Torah scroll laid out before you is a path. Not towards righteousness or heaven or the Moshiach, but to known and achievable goals—security, companionship, community…’ He had thought this was enough, but starts to question. Ezra, on the other hand, is living a secular life, working as a public servant, with a long term, live-in non-Jewish girlfriend. Their reunion proceeds to stir up simmering emotions and disquiet for both men.

Yonatan and Ezra’s renewed friendship highlights the clash of cultures that can exist within the small but diverse Australian Jewish community.

In alternate and deeply reflective perspectives, the reader follows each man through a tumultuous and ultimately transformative period of his life. Each is struggling, in his own way, to discover who he is and how he wants to be in the world. Yonatan within an all-encompassing, often stifling religious community that demands absolute obedience to ancient laws and customs that set him apart from mainstream society. Ezra, with the immense freedoms of mind and body that modern secular life affords him, but no guidebook on how to be good, no innate sense of belonging. He looks but can’t find the comfort he needs in religion: ‘He was the cause of his own suffering, and he had to be the one to end it. There were no answers in that shule, only nostalgia and the last vestiges of a faith he had long since abandoned.’ Each man feels real, his choices complex, his journey absorbing.

Yonatan and Ezra’s renewed friendship highlights the clash of cultures that can exist within the small but diverse Australian Jewish community, as well as broader multicultural Australia. It also, conversely, illustrates the universality of each man’s experience. Both yearn to live in a way that is true to themselves and those closest to them. That Goldberg is able to traverse such themes in a tightly plotted, engaging novel that doesn’t feel overwrought or pretentious is testament to his skill and sensitivity as a writer.

— Lisa Emanuel