Bumper edition!

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl By Carrie Brownstein

I think I was either slightly too old, or Sleater-Kinney was slightly too obscure for me to have formed much of a view about Carrie Brownstein's band contemporaneously. By the time that she's talking about (late 90s) I had moved on, really, from Seattle grunge and was deeply into the Sydney band scene. Which of course was so heavily influence by Seattle, but had a very specific Australian pub rock and punk twist. I was also by that time able to more fully admit my love of actual pop music, and that I found the most low-fi and discordant of the grunge bands actually pretty hard to listen to. In any case, Carrie is most definitely a pioneer and legend of the scene, and Portlandia is so, so hilarious. Her family sounds messed up. Thank you Carrie Brownstein, for your gifts to the arts and your cool hair and makeup and for continuing a fine tradition of music.

An Education by Lynn Barber

This memoir was famously made into a movie with Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard about Lyn's years as a teenage girl seduced by a real-life conman. The movie only goes up to the first two or so chapters of the book, and the rest of the book is about her life at Oxford, and then long career in media and publishing. Lynn is quite clear that she spent her whole time at Oxford smoking pot, sleeping with fellow students (50, she reckons) and exaggerating bouts of ill health to pass with an aegrotat. She then casts herself as somewhat of a pioneering truth-teller, giving the people the nasty tabloid gossip that they want. That sounds like kind of a gross career to have to, to me, but she seems happy with it. Good for you, Lynn Barber.

Air Kiss and Tell by Charlotte Dawson

Ohhhhhhh, this book is so sad. This memoir was published in 2012; Charlotte Dawson killed herself with a drug overdose in February 2014. The book definitely details her life's ups and downs. The marriage to Scott Miller and the abortion she was pressured to have so as to avoid ruining his training preparation for the 2000 Olympics (a team he didn't make, in the end, due to his own drug use and personal problems) sounds like the worst. After that, she relocated to New Zealand while pursing defamation litigation against News Corp Australia that took seven years to settle in her favour. It seemed like she was treated awfully in NZ as a public persona. Throughout the writing she does maintain a cheerful attitude and a workhorse-like approach to her career, taking whatever came her way as  a D-list TV presenter and erstwhile 90s department store model. You cannot fault her willingness to work. There are obviously moments recast with her in the best light, including some very fake ANTM backstage dialogue about the arrest of her last boyfriend, a con-man developer. That event also gives rise to the funniest moment of the book, her response to a fellow air traveller, asked why she is crying on a  late night flight from Brisbane to Sydney, that her partner has just been arrested for millions of dollars’ worth of bank fraud, and so she has to go home to walk the dog. Ugh, Charlotte. Sorry people were so crap to you.

Journey from Venice by Ruth Cracknell

Ruth Cracknell, beloved Australian icon of stage and screen, had already written her official memoir- A Biased Memoir- before taking the eponymous journey to Venice, which she doe s with her husband, Eric Phillips, between engagements with the Sydney Theatre Company. On day two or three of the journey, he is admitted to hospital with an uncontrollably bloody nose, which then becomes a stroke, a cancer diagnosis, and a tortuous navigation to have him medically evacuated to Australia, where he dies a few weeks after arrival. The story is obviously hideous for her, and the B plot is how this city of Venice, at first so enticing and romantic with its complicated architecture and social hierarchy becomes a villain in the story. 

Despite being a memoir, she manages to make it not about her by referring to herself only ever as "Mrs Philipps". Hah. Only in a woman's memoir. On the flip side, there's a scene when two Australians, holidaying in Venice, recognise Ruth from tv and approach her to say hello. She blurts out to them the horrible story about her husband's illness, and how she's navigating this all alone and doesn't speak Italian. I bet those Aussies still tell that story.

This book foreshadows The Year of Magical Thinking in exploring the loss of a life's companion, and dealing with strangers- especially medical personnel- who just can't and don't understand it all. She, like, Joan Didion, gives voice to universal love and grief. It's lovely to have someone with such skills write it all down.

From Strength to Strength by Sara Henderson

Sara Henderson is a Gina Rhinehart-esque character from the 1980s, with a pretty truly amazing story that is still hugely problematic. She's from a well-to-do family from Sydney, and in the 1950s meets and marries an American army officer and investment banker, quite a bit older than her. He takes her off to Hong Kong and they have ever so many hilarious, racist japes while they sail around Hong Kong Harbour and he's obviously rooting every woman around them. Then one day, he says they're moving back to Australia because he's bought a million-acre beef cattle station in the Northern Territory from which they will make their millions. There's no road, there's no farmhouse, no water, no amenities at all. He's hired one or two people to work for them and they all live in a wall-less tin shed for several years trying to get the concern off the ground. He's still rooting around, despite the lack of roads out. Things get better, and then worse. Drought, mustering, illness, injury, three daughters, it does all sound very hard. Then he dies, and not only is the farm struggling, but he's also transferred the whole company to her name, and it's about a million dollars in debt, which she didn't know. Because this is an Australian story about money and the land, there's one daughter who sues her mother and is lost to her forever. Apparently the dad made some promises to her, and when he didn't pay up, she sued the compmay, which was all in her mother's name. However, triumph! Plucky Sara and her remaining two daughters turn things around, work very, very hard in a physical capacity that I cannot imagine, and save the farm! Hurrah! In 1991, Sara Henderson was awarded Australian Businesswoman of the Year. Good for her.

Problems: where did that million-acre farm come from? Not once does she mention any Aboriginal ownership or presence on the land, except for a couple of her staff who are portrayed as being stupid and/or drunk. It's just totally absent and such a necessary thing to mentione. Sara also says that her experience was the "most demanding, humiliating and challenging obstacle course any human could be expected to endure." Because I don't want to discount any woman's experience, I am not going to tell her that it was not unbelievably demanding, enormously humiliating, and extremely challenging. However, I feel like she's not in a position to describe it as "the most". I mean, it surely was hard, but moreso than being a refugee, a beaten wife, or even an Aboriginal woman in the Northern Territory in the 1970s? Sara Henderson died from breast cancer in 2005, sadly, having been a high profile advocate for Breast Screen Australia since her wayward in 1991. By this stage she had also having fallen out with all of her daughters. The farm was apparently wound up in 2011, following the ban on the live export cattle trade.