'… most nights I find myself trying to combine with someone else to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth, and tangled hair. This new animal. I am medicated by another body. Drunk on warm skin. Dumbly high on the damp friction between them and me.
'It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her; she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too.
'Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.
'And then something happens to her mum and suddenly Amelia's got too many feelings and the only thing that makes any sense to her is running away.
'It takes the intervention of her two fathers and some hilariously wrong encounters with other broken people in a struggling Tasmanian BDSM club to help her accept the truth she has been hiding from. And in a final, cataclysmic scene, we learn along with Amelia that you need to feel another person's weight before you can feel your own.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Here is my little hypothesis: People love to say that the problem with Australian literature is a lack of critical culture. It’s not. It’s that people don’t read Australian literature, and then they lie about it online. Every day I open Instagram and think, it is so brave of you to post a picture of that book you haven’t read. Someone could ask you a single question about it and the whole house of cards would come down. But nobody will, because they haven’t read it either.' (Introduction)
'A soulful and intimate comedy that fearlessly questions our attitudes towards death and sex.'
'Ella Baxter’s debut novel is about a young woman attempting to make sense of her world and her body after she has experienced two serious bouts of grief. This needs to be said upfront because a reader could get caught up in the detail of this story and forget that this young woman is experiencing deep pain.' (Introduction)
'Ella Baxter’s debut novel is about a young woman attempting to make sense of her world and her body after she has experienced two serious bouts of grief. This needs to be said upfront because a reader could get caught up in the detail of this story and forget that this young woman is experiencing deep pain.' (Introduction)
'Here is my little hypothesis: People love to say that the problem with Australian literature is a lack of critical culture. It’s not. It’s that people don’t read Australian literature, and then they lie about it online. Every day I open Instagram and think, it is so brave of you to post a picture of that book you haven’t read. Someone could ask you a single question about it and the whole house of cards would come down. But nobody will, because they haven’t read it either.' (Introduction)
'A soulful and intimate comedy that fearlessly questions our attitudes towards death and sex.'
