How to be a Girl – Marlo Mack
Mama, something went wrong in your tummy. And it made me come out as a boy instead of a girl.
When Marlo Mack’s three-year-old says these words, she’s not surprised – but she’s completely unprepared. Marlo gave birth to a beautiful baby boy – M – and brushed his pleas for pink clothes and dresses aside as a young child’s playful experimentation with gender. But when her son begs to be put back in her tummy because he came out wrong, she knows she must listen more closely.
How to Be a Girl is a raw and unflinching memoir of a mother grappling with her child’s transition. Always wanting to support M, Marlo – whose podcast of the same name has over 1.3 million downloads – finds her liberal values surprisingly challenged, and as she learns more about gender and its varied expressions, she questions what being a girl – or a boy, or something else entirely – really means.
Queen Menopause – Alison Daddo
A friendly, frank, compassionate and comprehensive companion for any woman experiencing menopause or anyone wondering what to expect.
We live in a world where women are still mostly seen as second-class, where our beauty is our currency, and our aging bodies render us somewhat invisible.
Women are powerful, especially as we get older when we begin to care less about the external. We forget society’s standard and turn our back on the beauty stamp of approval . . .
Now that I’ve crossed that invisible line into menopause, into the second half of my life, I look around me in wonder . . . and sometimes despair. It’s a challenge to not see yourself the way your culture sees you.
Every woman will eventually go through menopause – that’s half the population of the planet! And yet it’s something that is still not fully explored. It’s held in shame by some women and ignored by others. It can be devastating to some and a call to freedom for others. After going through her own ‘change’, Ali Daddo wanted to explore all the feelings around menopause and especially the post-menopausal years that so many women talk about as being ‘the best years of their life’.
Through sharing her own experience in a very real way, Ali hopes that women won’t feel so alone in what can be a very lonely time. Alongside stories from some very well known Australian women, including Georgie Parker, Anita Heiss and Rhonda Burchmore, Queen Menopause is the book Ali wishes she’d had when she was approaching menopause – so she could have been better prepared for what was coming, embraced the process and felt supported.
This is for all women.
Rattled – Ellis Gunn
Rattled tells a frighteningly honest story of what it feels like to be pursued by a stalker. Ellis Gunn’s world is turned upside down when she realises that she is being followed by a man she doesn’t know and that she can’t make him stop.
Fledging – Hannah Bourne-Tayor
When lifelong bird-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor moved with her husband to Ghana seven years ago she couldn’t have anticipated how her life would be forever changed by her unexpected encounters with nature and the subsequent bonds she formed.
Plucked from the comfort and predictability of her life before, Hannah struggled to establish herself in her new environment, striving to belong in the rural grasslands far away from home.
In this challenging situation, she was forced to turn inwards and interrogate her own sense of identity, however in the animal life around her, and in two wild birds in particular, Hannah found a source of solace and a way to reconnect with the world in which she was living.
Fledgling is a portrayal of adaptability, resilience and self-discovery in the face of isolation and change, fuelled by the quiet power of nature and the unexpected bonds with animals she encounters.
Hannah encourages us to reconsider the conventional boundaries of the relationships people have with animals through her inspiring and very beautiful glimpse of what is possible when we allow ourselves to connect to the natural world.
Full of determination and compassion, Fledgling is a powerful meditation on our instinctive connection to nature. It shows that even the tiniest of birds can teach us what is important in life and how to embrace every day.
Managing Expectations – Minnie Driver
When I was six, I wrote my first short essay. The title given by the teacher was: ‘When I grow up, I want to be…’ and I wrote about how when I grew up, I wanted to be a farmer’s daughter. My dad worked in insurance. Now, though, I realise how apt that ambition was. It set up a template in my life of wanting something impossible to become true. How in trying to make something impossible happen, and failing repeatedly, other things happened. Things that became my life. A life I love, because it was made with so many holes that I enjoy filling in. Managing Expectations is a memoir-ish, a tell-most, by Minnie Driver: A-list actor, mum, singer and songwriter, exploring her life most extraordinary. With searing honesty and bags of laughs, Minnie Driver tells us how things not working out so often worked out remarkably well, and how reaching for the dream is easily more interesting, expansive, sad and funny than the dream itself coming true.
