First Book Club: Amy Thunig on 'Tell Me Again'

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For November that debut is Tell Me Again by Amy Thunig (UQP)—a collection of memoir essays in which Amy narrates her journey through childhood and adolescence, growing up with parents who struggled with addiction and incarceration. In recounting her experiences, she shows how the stories we tell about ourselves can help to shape and sustain us. Ellen Cregan spoke to Amy in an Instagram Live conversation earlier this month.

Amy Thunig standing and leaning against a yellow door frame. She is wearing a light grey suit with a black top underneath

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. To watch the full conversation, visit KYD‘s Instagram profile.

For those who haven’t had a chance to read your book yet, could you give us a bit of a summary?

So my book Tell Me Again is a collection of short stories. They are all true stories, they’re stories from my life, which is why it is called a memoir, even though I’m only 34. So the way it’s structured is if you’re like me and a TikTok addict with a short attention span, you can read one chapter anywhere in the book, and it stands alone as its own story, but you can also read it from start to finish and get the bigger picture that way. And it’s a series of stories from the time my mum was pregnant with me up until a couple of years ago. And it’s telling stories from my life, because my life doesn’t really align with what I realised people assumed my life and my stories were.

So when I was a child, my dad was a bank robber; both of my parents struggled with heroin addiction throughout my childhood and my adolescence and into my adulthood; we moved around a lot because of those factors; and we were incredibly poor, we were impoverished. So I grew up in a criminalised household. And also at the same time, I grew up in a really strong Indigenous community, really well loved by my elders, by my own mob, as well as elders who weren’t the same nation who adopted me as well. And so it’s the storying of existing within those spaces that don’t really get talked about a lot. Like, what does it look like to be a little kid in an impoverished home where there’s addiction and where your dad’s in and out of incarceration? And what does it look like to be a nerdy, queer, autistic kid in that space? And there’s a lot of love in there, and it doesn’t romanticise the trauma, I don’t think, but it also isn’t trauma porn. So I tried to walk the line of being honest without just dishing up trauma on a plate. So trigger warning for pretty much all of the traumas—but it’s certainly not central to the book.

I love to hear you describe this as a collection of short stories—it’s being marketed as a memoir, because there’s not too many other ways you could describe it in one word, but short stories is so fantastic, because that’s really what it is. And it felt to me almost like when one of my family members sits down to tell me a story, and it’s that little portion of life.

Yeah, I would have preferred to call it Tell Me Again: a series of short stories that are true and a little bit difficult to read, but also kind of cool, but that’s a bit too wordy for a title. So it’s technically a memoir, that’s what we had to call it. But it’s very weird calling it that.

I tried to walk the line of being honest without just dishing up trauma on a plate.

So what was this book’s journey to publication? You’re obviously a writer and an academic, and you’ve popped up in lots of different media places. How did this book come to be?

So I’m an academic, and a mum, and I never thought of myself as a writer. And actually there’s a story in the book about how when I first got into uni and started to figure out the rhythm and the pacing of university in my undergraduate degree, I had taken some literature focused courses and loved them, and shared with some people that maybe instead of being a lawyer, I would want to be a writer. And they laughed me down and I just thought, oh, how silly of me, I’m not a writer, that’s not for me. And I put that to sleep. And it was really not until I wrote the book and I remembered that moment and I wrote that story that I was like, oh, I’ve become a writer without the front of my brain realising that that’s what I’ve done.

So in the academy, we write really particular language. It’s very exclusive, it’s very wanky, it’s its own language, and that’s part of what keeps so many people out of the academy—because it’s designed to make everyday people think that it’s not for them. And I had gotten really good at writing like that. But when I started my PhD, I realised that researchers actually have to promise to disseminate their findings and their writings. And what a lot of academics will do, particularly if their research is in Indigenous spaces, is they’ll just print out some of their scholarly papers which are filled with words like ‘dearth’ and ‘paucity’, and they’ll drop it at the local Aboriginal Medical Centre and tick that box for themselves. And I just thought, that’s bullshit—that’s not actually sharing the academic work in a way that the people you took the information from could then access it and digest it. And so the first year of my PhD, I applied for a writing fellowship with IndigenousX, where each month I was mentored to create a short media piece. And that trained me to write for the media.

And so I started writing in the media purely to take what I was finding and hearing and learning in the academy and make it accessible to my community, to my family. And then that ended up growing into a writing career outside of being an academic. And so I was switching between media language and academic language constantly.

And then I wrote a semi-personal piece for the Sydney Review of Books, which got the attention of some publishers, and UQP were one of those publishers. So I had a few meetings with Aviva Tuffield, who did end up being the publisher and the editor that I chose to go with. At first we were talking about maybe an academic text or an education text, because my qualification’s specifically in teaching, but I was like, I’m doing a PhD, I don’t really have the capacity to write another heavy text at the same time. And then I started thinking about some of the comments that I was hearing, people saying that there’s no way that I came from a negative or a difficult background, or there’s no way I’d experienced homelessness. And I thought, okay, there’s a gap in that story and people don’t realise that that’s part of the reality, and that people who live in those environments do have worth and do have value.

I started thinking about some of the comments that I was hearing, people saying that there’s no way that I came from a negative or a difficult background. I thought, okay, there’s a gap in that story.

So I ended up pitching the series of short stories to Aviva, and I wrote five example stories. I went to my parents and I sat with each of them, I told them my idea. Both of them were very supportive—they both had veto power as well, so if I wrote them in it or it involved them, they got the first read. They contributed at times, they helped me round out details, particularly in the earlier stories where I was very young. What I remembered was quite specific and limited to my worldview, and they helped me understand the context, so then I could provide that for the reader. So it wasn’t a simple process, it happened in a nonlinear way and I ended up writing it during a lockdown while doing my PhD. But we’re really happy with how it turned out.

Something I noticed when I was reading the book is the way that you write, you really didn’t compromise on using language and storytelling methods of your own culture. And I love reading books like that, especially hearing now that you’re from this academic background. And in your book, it’s a really big feature of it is like the cultural language and the slang and just not changing how you’re speaking to your reader.

Yeah, I think this was why I was so glad to work with UQP. There were times where I would write something up—and I knew it made perfect sense, but without realising it, maybe that section was quite heavy in Aboriginal English or community-based language. And so then Aviva would send back edits, and I’d have to send it back to her and say, no, this isn’t a mistake, that’s Aboriginal English, or I’ve written it that way on purpose. And she was fantastic. She was really supportive of that. And the other thing that was great about working with UQP was—because the book goes through multiple readers, and they’re looking for gaps that you can’t see. It’s your story, you know it so well that it makes perfect sense to you. You need copy editors and editors to read it for you and say, ‘hey, can you clarify what this means?’ Or, ‘you’re talking about someone here, but you’ve never introduced them to the reader. So you have to either write them in properly or remove them entirely.’ And, yeah, the final reader on my book was an Indigenous woman, so it meant that I didn’t have to teach her what I was doing, she could read what I was doing. She knew, she understood our ways, what I was saying there. So that was really helpful, too. Overall, I was so glad that I stuck with my guns and went with UQP for this book.

I love to hear you describe this as a collection of short stories—it’s being marketed as a memoir, because there’s not too many other ways you could describe it in one word, but short stories is so fantastic, because that’s really what it is. And it felt to me almost like when one of my family members sits down to tell me a story, and it’s that little portion of life.

Yeah, I would have preferred to call it Tell Me Again: a series of short stories that are true and a little bit difficult to read, but also kind of cool, but that’s a bit too wordy for a title. So it’s technically a memoir, that’s what we had to call it. But it’s very weird calling it that.

I tried to walk the line of being honest without just dishing up trauma on a plate.

So what was this book’s journey to publication? You’re obviously a writer and an academic, and you’ve popped up in lots of different media places. How did this book come to be?

So I’m an academic, and a mum, and I never thought of myself as a writer. And actually there’s a story in the book about how when I first got into uni and started to figure out the rhythm and the pacing of university in my undergraduate degree, I had taken some literature focused courses and loved them, and shared with some people that maybe instead of being a lawyer, I would want to be a writer. And they laughed me down and I just thought, oh, how silly of me, I’m not a writer, that’s not for me. And I put that to sleep. And it was really not until I wrote the book and I remembered that moment and I wrote that story that I was like, oh, I’ve become a writer without the front of my brain realising that that’s what I’ve done.

So in the academy, we write really particular language. It’s very exclusive, it’s very wanky, it’s its own language, and that’s part of what keeps so many people out of the academy—because it’s designed to make everyday people think that it’s not for them. And I had gotten really good at writing like that. But when I started my PhD, I realised that researchers actually have to promise to disseminate their findings and their writings. And what a lot of academics will do, particularly if their research is in Indigenous spaces, is they’ll just print out some of their scholarly papers which are filled with words like ‘dearth’ and ‘paucity’, and they’ll drop it at the local Aboriginal Medical Centre and tick that box for themselves. And I just thought, that’s bullshit—that’s not actually sharing the academic work in a way that the people you took the information from could then access it and digest it. And so the first year of my PhD, I applied for a writing fellowship with IndigenousX, where each month I was mentored to create a short media piece. And that trained me to write for the media.

And so I started writing in the media purely to take what I was finding and hearing and learning in the academy and make it accessible to my community, to my family. And then that ended up growing into a writing career outside of being an academic. And so I was switching between media language and academic language constantly.

And then I wrote a semi-personal piece for the Sydney Review of Books, which got the attention of some publishers, and UQP were one of those publishers. So I had a few meetings with Aviva Tuffield, who did end up being the publisher and the editor that I chose to go with. At first we were talking about maybe an academic text or an education text, because my qualification’s specifically in teaching, but I was like, I’m doing a PhD, I don’t really have the capacity to write another heavy text at the same time. And then I started thinking about some of the comments that I was hearing, people saying that there’s no way that I came from a negative or a difficult background, or there’s no way I’d experienced homelessness. And I thought, okay, there’s a gap in that story and people don’t realise that that’s part of the reality, and that people who live in those environments do have worth and do have value.

I started thinking about some of the comments that I was hearing, people saying that there’s no way that I came from a negative or a difficult background. I thought, okay, there’s a gap in that story.

So I ended up pitching the series of short stories to Aviva, and I wrote five example stories. I went to my parents and I sat with each of them, I told them my idea. Both of them were very supportive—they both had veto power as well, so if I wrote them in it or it involved them, they got the first read. They contributed at times, they helped me round out details, particularly in the earlier stories where I was very young. What I remembered was quite specific and limited to my worldview, and they helped me understand the context, so then I could provide that for the reader. So it wasn’t a simple process, it happened in a nonlinear way and I ended up writing it during a lockdown while doing my PhD. But we’re really happy with how it turned out.

Something I noticed when I was reading the book is the way that you write, you really didn’t compromise on using language and storytelling methods of your own culture. And I love reading books like that, especially hearing now that you’re from this academic background. And in your book, it’s a really big feature of it is like the cultural language and the slang and just not changing how you’re speaking to your reader.

Yeah, I think this was why I was so glad to work with UQP. There were times where I would write something up—and I knew it made perfect sense, but without realising it, maybe that section was quite heavy in Aboriginal English or community-based language. And so then Aviva would send back edits, and I’d have to send it back to her and say, no, this isn’t a mistake, that’s Aboriginal English, or I’ve written it that way on purpose. And she was fantastic. She was really supportive of that. And the other thing that was great about working with UQP was—because the book goes through multiple readers, and they’re looking for gaps that you can’t see. It’s your story, you know it so well that it makes perfect sense to you. You need copy editors and editors to read it for you and say, ‘hey, can you clarify what this means?’ Or, ‘you’re talking about someone here, but you’ve never introduced them to the reader. So you have to either write them in properly or remove them entirely.’ And, yeah, the final reader on my book was an Indigenous woman, so it meant that I didn’t have to teach her what I was doing, she could read what I was doing. She knew, she understood our ways, what I was saying there. So that was really helpful, too. Overall, I was so glad that I stuck with my guns and went with UQP for this book.

So I wanted to talk a bit about the memory aspects of the book, because there’s a few parts that are from your very early childhood, and you did just say you were speaking to your parents and your family about it. And I wanted to ask about relying on your memory to write these stories and whether you used any techniques, or whether it was just asking other people?

Well, the thing with trauma is you either end up with really clear memories, or you end up with no memory. And so I have sections that I’ve got patchy memory about, and I just didn’t put it in the book. I started by writing the stories that had been so traumatic for me that I remember, if I close my eyes and I go into it, I can see it—which is post-traumatic stress disorder, I’m actually just describing PTSD, or CPTSD. So some of those memories are super clear. One of the stories is about my parents taking us to the zoo, and my mum overdosed and basically died, or almost died, was resuscitated. Now, I was eight, so I was old enough that the level of trauma involved in that event meant that I had 98 per cent of those details scorched into my brain, down to the toy that I took home from the zoo. Other stories, though, were not ones that I personally remembered because I wasn’t outside of the womb, so there’s storying in there. There’s an entire story in there about how I came to be called Amy, and it’s quite complicated—it starts with my mum throwing hands, like, bashing a woman while eight months pregnant with me. Now, obviously, I was in the womb, but I know that story because I grew up hearing it. I know that story. My mum and my dad and my oldest sibling and my aunties, these were stories that had been shared and recounted. And so the way I wrote it, I tried to move in my language between sharing stories that were shared with me, and then switching to first person. And so some of the stories are written the way they’ve been said to me, rather than from my viewpoint.

These were stories that had been shared and recounted… and so some of the stories are written the way they’ve been said to me, rather than from my viewpoint.

One of the great benefits of having my parents involved was if I shared it with my dad and then I took it and I shared it with my mum, they would often laugh at certain points and say, ‘oh, that’s right, because we were at such and such for this event’. And so they would share additional information. And there are a couple of little details, like the story where dad gets arrested—I had this imagery, I said to him when I gave him the draft, ‘I keep wanting to write about, like, clowns dressed as cops coming out of a clown car. And I don’t know why I keep wanting to use that as, like, symbolism.’ And dad laughed and was like, ‘oh, no, we were in an orange Volkswagen Beetle. That’s why you’re brain is trying to give you that imagery, we were in that car when it happened.’ And it was one of those things where, again, that was a very traumatic experience, so it was very patchy—but talking with Dad brought it back up, refreshed the memory, brought hazy things into focus and helped me also understand the circumstances better—because I’m hearing details that, of course, I would have been shielded from as a child. But now I’m an adult, they felt it was appropriate to share those details with me.

So it ended up being…really good. Like, I remember when I presented the first few stories, which included one that mentions my brother passing away, I was really worried that it would trigger really bad mental health for my mum, that it would be really upsetting for them. And both of them commented things like, basically, I remembered them and my childhood with greater kindness than they thought. Like, I remembered it better than they imagined. And I think it’s because when people are struggling with addiction and struggling with the circumstances they find themselves in, like, no one hates them or judges them more than they loathe and judge themselves. And so it was really good for them to see how much of the good I did remember, and how I contextualised the bad. So it was very complex, but I was happy with how that process went.

This is why I think this is such an important book for people to read if they have someone in their life struggling with addiction, or even moreso if they don’t—seeing that perspective that you have, which is completely different to what I think anyone would imagine.

Part of why I decided to write the book was when I would share that I’ve been homeless before—like, say I was on The Drum and we were advocating that people should be housed, being able to say, ‘actually, yeah, I had to deal with homelessness when I was trying to finish my senior years in high school,’ or things like period poverty or things like incarceration. When I point out that I had familial personal childhood experiences of these things, people either wouldn’t believe me, or they would ask me questions that were so disrespectful that they were telling on themselves. Like, people that I had until that moment respected, would say things like, ‘oh, and you’ve got children—it must be so hard raising children without your parents in your life.’ I’d say, what are you talking about? I had coffee with my dad yesterday. There’s just this assumption when you’re a kid and you live in these communities and you’re part of these communities and families, you are told by people outside of your community that you are worthless. Like, if you have bad outcomes, they say, oh, it’s because you’ve got bad parents. But if you have good outcomes, and your parents have had these difficulties, they’ll argue that, oh, no, it must have had nothing to do with your parents. And that was part of why I wrote the book—it’s more complex than that, and you’re telling on yourself if that’s what you think.

If you have bad outcomes, they say, oh, it’s because you’ve got bad parents. But if you have good outcomes, they’ll argue that it must have had nothing to do with your parents.

Writing about trauma, did you have any self care strategies that you had to put in place while you were writing? What was that experience like, revisiting all that stuff in such intense detail?

I probably should have had more self care things in place than I did. But I entered last year probably still relying on disassociation more than I should have, very much still in that hyper focus, hyper productivity mindset. I didn’t have many strategies ready because I’ve just been working really hard my whole life. This is the first year where I’ve had the privilege and the luxury of rest—I went on my first holiday this year, I am only now able to actually take that time to try and find a psychologist that won’t cry when I tell them certain things. I’ve made a few psychologists cry, if that’s any indication of the difficulty of the stories in the book. But yeah, like, really trying to access healthy coping strategies.

I think my three main tips for any writer, but particularly if you’re writing trauma, would be drink a lot of water, because it means you have to get up to use the toilet. So it forces you to move your body maybe every half an hour if you’re drinking enough water. Go for walks—it helps clear your mind, but it also helps put rhythm into your writing. And if you’re not a great eater—and when I really stress, I forget to eat, I think I fail to feel hungry—invest in protein bars to make sure you’re getting in the goodness. So they were the things that helped me.

My last question for you is about the flipside of that. This book, of course, contains a lot of trauma, but there’s also so many beautiful memories and so many positive things. What was the experience like, writing about those lovely times in your life?

I think it was really lovely, overall. Like, I don’t consider myself to have had a hard childhood. Something that I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older and I’ve gained access to wealthier spaces—as a guest, I’m not wealthy myself yet—is that I’m quite a safe person, like, there’s something about me that triggers a feeling of safeness in a lot of people, and as a result, people will often disclose abuse to me, child abuse, difficult relations with their family. And the more I’ve navigated privileged spaces, the more I’ve discovered a lot of people didn’t feel safe in their homes growing up. A lot of people have had parents or caregivers who never told them how much they loved them, never told them that they could do it. A lot of people, when they went to bed at night, didn’t feel safe in their own beds.

And I felt safe in my bed. I felt so loved by my parents. When I came home and I was like, ‘I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to university’—everyone, my parents, my grandparents, they’re like, ‘Amy’s going to university’. They’d never been university, they didn’t know how to get into university, but they knew I was going to go. And I’d get 98 on a test out of 100, and my dad would say, ‘we’ll get the next two marks next time, bub.’ They believed I could get the 100. And my mum always—I feel really bad for women and non-binary AFAB people who were raised up with mums who put them down. This is something I learned on TikTok a lot, like mums who cut them down and comment on their bodies. My mum, she passed away this year—she was a wild woman but I knew she thought I was great. And I think a lot of people don’t get that from their parents. Like my parents, they were having a hard time most of their life, but they thought we were great. My mum, she loved us, and I believed I could because everyone in my life believed I could. And I think that is such a blessing.

And I learned so much going into other homes, and going into workplaces, and being identified as someone who was comforting and safe, and having people that I thought really had their life together tell me that they weren’t safe in their own home as a child, and that’s something that I didn’t feel. For those of you who haven’t read the book yet, like trigger warning for all of the traumas, including sexual assault—but never in my own home, never from my family. And I think that that is a big deal.

My mental health is precarious at times, but I think the stability that knowing I was loved by my parents and my grandparents has gone a long way to helping me reach a point in my life where I’m ready to start thriving and not just surviving.

Tell Me Again is available now from your local independent bookseller.