Elspeth Muir Elspeth Muir i(A140564 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 8 y separately published work icon Wasted : A Story of Alcohol, Grief and a Death in Brisbane Elspeth Muir , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2016 9178262 2016 single work autobiography

'Maybe it was fitting to get shitfaced at Alexander’s wake. ‘He would have wanted it,’ people said. And they were probably right, because he was only twenty-one. We drank with a sad urgency, turning the reason for our grief into its elixir.

'In 2009 Elspeth Muir’s youngest brother finished his last university exam and went out with some mates to get drunk. Later that night he wandered to the Story Bridge. He put his phone, wallet, T-shirt and thongs on the walkway, climbed over the railing, and jumped thirty metres into the Brisbane River below.

'Three days passed before police divers pulled his body out of the water. When Alexander had drowned, his blood-alcohol reading was almost 0.3.

'Why do some of us drink so much, and what happens when we do? Fewer young Australians are drinking heavily, but the rates of alcohol abuse and associated problems —from blackouts to sexual assaults and one-punch killings—are undiminished.

'Intimate and beautifully told, urgent and confronting, Wasted mixes memoir with reportage to illuminate the sorrows, and the joys, of drinking.' (Publication summary)

1 Daddy-long-legs Elspeth Muir , 2014 single work short story
— Appears in: Bumf 2014;
1 Pissed Off Elspeth Muir , 2012 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , Winter no. 36 2012; (p. 47-54)
'AUSTRALIA, any city, Saturday night: red unsteady men in pastel shirts and designer sneakers have groping sweaty fists and angry eyes; bored tall thin men in black jeans, pointed leather shoes and structured mullets stand in copses holding conspicuously cheap beer. Lone middle-aged men in tight shirts with tattooed biceps stretch jewelled fingers and survey the crowd. Eighteen-year-old men travel in excited, sexed-up packs.' (Author's introduction)
1 Shipwreck Elspeth Muir , 2011 single work short story
— Appears in: The Sun-Herald , 5 June 2011; (p. 31-33) The Best of The Lifted Brow. Volume One 2013; (p. 205-214)
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