Cirrus@Austlit

'The Crying Room movingly explores family boundaries and stories, finding original ways to express the contradictory experience of belonging to a family, and being an individual at the same time.

'When Bernie Rodgers and her husband move to the coastal town of Ballina, she finds that there is more than a physical distance separating her from her adult daughters. Bernie loves her daughters, but the problem she realises is with the way she loved them.

'Bernie's daughter Susie is professionally successful, but her feelings remain distant, even to herself. When she takes on the responsibility for caring for her niece, the pieces of her life finally snap into place. The inexplicable disappearance of an aeroplane though, plunges her life into mystery once again.

'Morally acute and dazzlingly accomplished, this is an affecting novel about loneliness, love, family and the need to feel.' (Publication summary) 

'This essay argues that Jennifer Down’s two stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ point to the limits of referential language in conveying grief, loss and related emotional experiences. Referencing Denise Riley’s theories from The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion, I use Down’s stories as demonstrative of the concept that word choices do in fact contain emotion and affect and can transmit emotional experiences between the characters, and via characters from author to reader. Nonetheless, very often the referential properties of language are troubled in this process, and Down demonstrates the way in which the writer might convey affect and emotion through the techniques of silence, withholding, miscommunications and also through the unfolding of the narrative itself. Down avoids simplistic notions of closure and mourning by suggesting that the difficulty her characters experience is identifying the appropriate linguistic conventions to describe their emotional states, perhaps because there are none that can fully contain them. However, in the unfolding of these stories, difficult emotions and affects can be gestured towards, even outlined. Through this paradox, emotion and affect can indeed be ‘held’ not just in language, but in story, and this is particularly so when it moves away from signifying emotions in symbolic terms and represents them in a narrative sequence through an embodied narrator.' (Introduction)

'Amanda Lohrey might be described as a writer’s writer: proficient in short and long form fiction and a veteran of the essay. Her writing is the literature of ideas.' (Introduction)

'The conceit of Kate Grenville’s ninth novel is that the author discovers a memoir written by Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, the British army officer and pioneer of the Australian wool industry. Grenville acts as a “transcriber and editor” and in her foreword observes: “Australian history, like most histories, is mainly about men.” It is precisely this history that Elizabeth’s counter-narrative sets out to question.' (Introduction)