2024 memoir highlights
2024 has seen an abundance of wonderful memoirs, amongst them many standouts from Australians including journalists, chefs, TV and radio personalities, and esteemed authors. We have curated a selection of thought-provoking and inspirational local and international books which will have you crying, laughing, and everything in between.
A Season of Death by Mark Raphael Baker
Mark Raphael Baker was no stranger to death. Over seven years he had become a mourner three times over – for his first wife, for his brother and for his father. When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he began to reflect on their deaths, his probable death and on Death as, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a 'season' that produced a large and bitter harvest for the Baker family. Powerful and conflicting emotions assailed him, but their destructive power was always defeated by his love of his family and of life, which never deserted him even when his spirit was most weary. Over the short course of his illness, he came to realise that to love both truly, he must die as the most authentic version of himself he can achieve. It enabled him to die with humbling grace and dignity.
Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine
Michael and Mary Shelley are Christian fanatics who loathe their fellow Australians – especially their 'foul language, reckless indulgence of alcohol and obsession with idiotic ball sports'.
Lenore and Tom Blaine are working-class Queensland publicans raising a large family in a raucous, loving, rugby-league-obsessed home.
There's just one problem. The Blaines are foster parents to three of the Shelleys' children, who were removed from Michael and Mary as infants. And the Shelleys are prepared to do anything to get them back. Anything.
Australian Gospel is a family saga like no other – heartbreaking, hilarious and altogether astonishing.
We Are the Stars by Gina Chick
From day one of her wildly unconventional childhood, Gina Chick blazed her own trail, which led her to dance through the hidden world of 90’s Sydney nightlife into the arms of a conman. She fled to the wilderness to find healing, began a wondrous love affair with the deepest lessons life – and death – can offer, and found that all the answers are written in the wisdom of the body and the whirling silence of stars.
If you’re ready to get lost in jungles, wander into wolf-dens, sing with storms, rescue orphaned animals, dive to the depths, dance ‘til your knees wobble, fall in love, find yourself by losing it all, and most of all be real; this book is for you.
The Season by Helen Garner
It's footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson's suburban team. She turns up not only at every game (give or take), but at every training session, shivering on the sidelines in the dark, fascinated by the spectacle.
She's a passionate Western Bulldogs supporter (with a rather shaky grasp of the rules) and a great admirer of the players and the epic theatre of the game. But this is something more than that. It is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him in his last moments as a child and in his headlong rush into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for the team as it fights its way towards the finals.
The Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z.
In the vein of Joe Brainard's I Remember and Edouard Leve's Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison
In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life – her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope – and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy
In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy invites the reader into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her.
From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn, the richness of the author’s own.
John Berger & Me by Nikos Papastergiadis
In John Berger and Me, the eminent Australian sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis recalls his relationship with the late English writer and art critic John Berger. His memoir is both a portrait of their friendship, and an account of the work of his former mentor.
Berger was a successful author and artist who lived in England before he moved to a peasant village in the Haute-Savoie. Papastergiadias' father was born in a peasant village in Greece and migrated to work in factories in Australia. The memoir covers a period of ten years in the 1990s when the younger Nikos spent many summer months with the distinguished author, living in the family house and sharing duties such as the gathering of the harvest. It draws on personal memories, his deep knowledge of Berger's work and anecdotes of life in the village, and beyond.
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring – and surviving – an attempt on his life, thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him.
Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again.
Uses for Obsession: A (Chef's) Memoir by Ben Shewry
Chef and restaurateur Ben Shewry knows obsession well. Whether it's crispy-edged lasagne, saltwater crocodile ribs or the perfect potato, obsession is what motivates him and what makes him tick. It's also what has propelled his Melbourne restaurant Attica into the league of the most innovative, acclaimed dining experiences in the world, and one of the most vital in Australian history.
In this absorbing and wide-ranging memoir meets manifesto, Shewry applies his sometimes searing, sometimes comic eye to creative freedom in the kitchen, food journalism, sexism in hospitality, the fraud of the farm-to-table sustainability ethos, the cult of the chef, cooking as muse and the legendary Family Bolognese.
A Thousand Feasts by Nigel Slater
Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei. Nigel records the small things, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. In A Thousand Feasts he details a soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese.
This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end.
Kitchen Sentimental by Annie Smithers
In her new memoir, respected chef and paddock-to-plate pioneer Annie Smithers answers the question she is asked most often: why cook?
Annie takes us on a journey through every significant kitchen in her life, both domestic and professional, sharing with engaging honesty her personal development, her surprisingly complex relationship with food, and the lessons she has learned along the way to find her culinary niche at the famed du Fermier restaurant in country Victoria.
A Bit on the Side by Virginia Trioli
Virginia Trioli knows that enduring joy is often found not in the big moments but in the small. And as a dedicated, almost obsessive, foodie, she believes that food gives us the perfect metaphor for how to seek, recognise and devour the real flavour of life. When the main course is heavy going or unappetising, the 'bits on the side' make life really delicious. The sweet and the sour; the salty, the bitter – our small, meaningful selections are the ones that make life glorious.
A Bit on the Side is an ode to joy, filled with wisdom, stories, memories and recipes, all told with Virginia's renowned insight and wicked sense of humour.
What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci
Food has always been an integral part of Stanley Tucci’s life: from stracciatella soup served in the shadow of the Pantheon, to marinara sauce cooked between scene rehearsals and costume fittings, to home-made pizza eaten with his children before bedtime.
Now, in What I Ate In One Year Tucci records twelve months of eating, in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.
Ranging from the mouth-wateringly memorable, to the comfortingly domestic, to the infuriatingly inedible, the meals memorialised in this diary are a prism for him to reflect on the ways his life, and his family, are constantly evolving. Through food he marks – and mourns – the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, and steels himself for what is to come.
Love, Death and Other Scenes by Nova Weetman
How do we become more after losing? Beloved Australian author Nova Weetman shares her heartfelt experiences with grief and loss while also celebrating the profound beauty of love and life.
Nova Weetman's unforgettable memoir reflects on experiences of love and loss from throughout her life, including: losing her beloved partner, playwright Aidan Fennessy, during the 2020 Covid lockdown; the death of her mother ten years earlier; her daughter turning eighteen and finishing school; and her own physical ageing. Using these events as a lens, Nova considers how various kinds of losses – and the complicated love they represent – change us and can become the catalysts for letting go.
Three Wild Dogs and the Truth by Markus Zusak
What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs - Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm? The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed ... not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning. There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love – and the joy and recognition of family.
From one of the world's great storytellers comes a tender, motley and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder; but it's also a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty.
